


down in the valley

by anothercover



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Family Feels, Grief/Mourning, Kid Fic, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, No Endgame Spoilers, POV Natasha Romanov, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-01-12 09:38:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18443906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothercover/pseuds/anothercover
Summary: Six years after the final battle with Thanos, Natasha wakes up in a cabin in the Pacific Northwest. She wakes up with a wedding ring. She wakes up with Clint also wearing one. She wakes up with their four year old son.She wakes up without any memory of how she acquired a single one of these things.[A different take onEndgame. No real spoilers.]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The usual disclaimer: more parts will be added as we go, I'm gonna try to get this son of a bitch finished before Endgame but no promises, I know nothing about what's coming but I'm trying to work out a lot of preemptive dread and all those trailers have me feeling SOME type of way, please enjoy!

  
  
  


The tip of Natasha’s nose is cold. It’s a slow crawl up to consciousness, but it’s the first thing she registers. 

The tip of her nose is cold, and when she breathes in, she can smell – pine trees? _Real_ pine trees, not vaguely chemical cleaning products, and just beneath it is the salt of the ocean, somehow, carrying its way in on the chill of the breeze. 

It’s lovely. It’s beyond lovely, and she’s so comfortable, so drowsy that she can’t bring herself to open her eyes. It’s too nice: she’s warm everywhere but her nose, and that makes it a good sort of cold, a cozy one. She loves the smell of the ocean. Always has.

Sleep is still pulling at her seductively, coiling its tendrils around her body. Dragging her back down beneath this puffy confection of a blanket, soothing and creeping and helping even out her breathing to the rhythm of the waves, which she gradually realizes are as real as the pine. It’s not part of a dream; there’s a rhythmic lull of water lapping against rock. 

She’s so tired that she aches with it, and sleep is stroking her hair, weighting her eyelids, promising her that whatever this is, she can figure it out later, later…

A warm hand slides onto her stomach, beneath her shirt, and her eyes fly open. The shock sends the possibility of sleep hurtling into some other dimension entirely. 

Natasha looks to the side and stops breathing. 

Clint’s head is on the pillow next to hers, sleepy-faced and stubbled, smiling lazily through half-lidded eyes.

“If we’re lucky, we’ve got about ten minutes,” he rumbles. “Lemme make ‘em count.” He drags his hand down her stomach, past the waistband of – sweatpants? Since when does she sleep in sweatpants, she never sleeps in this much clothing and then Natasha has no time to dwell on the sweatpants anymore because Clint’s hand is between her legs, rubbing at her cunt as his fingers press and tease and start circling her open. 

Her whole body flexes familiarly toward him even as her hands fly out to shove him away. She scrambles frantically up the bed, clutching at the comforter and gathering it around herself as though it’s some kind of armor. “Barton-what-the-fuck,” she hisses between clenched teeth, and now that she’s awake, aware – 

It comes hurtling back to her in screaming detail. 

_Whatever it takes_ , that was what they had all said. 

And it was taking everything. It was a war zone: the sky red and acrid and smoky, metal grinding against metal, occasional streaks of light from Carol’s photon blasts, roars of triumph and howls, of agony, bullets and explosions and – 

Natasha feels it, suddenly, the hot rush in her body, the blood draining from her face. She remembers. 

Steve. 

Steve’s mouth falling open in soundless shock. Steve crumpling to his knees like a discarded paper doll, Clint _screaming_ her name as she broke from her position like the amateur she had never been, slashing and burning her way to reach him even as she thought it was already too late – 

Clint’s sitting up now, looking worried. “Natasha,” he says, stretching out his hands for her. “Hey. Hey, sweetheart, it was just a nightmare, okay? I get them, too. Just – ”

“ _It’s not a fucking nightmare_ ,” she snarls at him, her whole body trembling. 

“Let’s walk through it,” he tells her. His voice is so calm and measured that it makes her want to bite his outstretched hand. It’s the voice he used on her when she first came to SHIELD, when no one was quite sure whether or not Hawkeye had brought back a human being or a wild animal. “What do you remember?”

“Thanos,” she grits out. “The last thing I remember is rushing Thanos. Don’t call me sweetheart.”

“Nat,” Clint says. “It’s just me. You trust me. Right?”

“I trusted you more before you started trying to finger me like a horny teenage prom date.” His mouth presses into a thin line, like he’s not sure if he wants to be angry or ashamed of himself. Natasha knows that look on him so well, and her heart is galloping behind her ribs. It hurts. It physically hurts; some distant, clinical part of her brain is trying to tell her that this is a panic attack. That’s all it is, it’s only a panic attack, and that’s not something that cripples a person who earned the call sign _Black Widow_ at age sixteen. 

But here she is anyway, her lungs a few sizes too small and her chest heaving. 

After a minute, the look on Clint’s face smooths itself into something slightly more neutral. “You want to keep being a dick to me, or you want me to help? I can take it either way, but I need to know pretty quick – we’re down to about five minutes now.”

 _This is Clint_ , Natasha tells herself. _This is only Clint. Whatever’s happening. Whatever the circumstance. This is Clint._

When she can bring herself to meet his eyes again, he sees what she’s thinking – the way he always does. But she says it anyway, even though she knows she doesn’t have to. 

“I trust you,” she says. “Help me.”

Clint takes her hands in his, slips two fingers over her pulse at the inside of her wrist. His skin is warm. “I’ve got you, babe,” he murmurs, so gentle. The endearment sends another wave of questions surging - _sweetheart, babe, his fingers between her legs_ \- but she’s trying to table them until this – whatever it is – passes. 

She focuses on what’s in front of her: this gesture that’s been theirs since early days, the one that brought her down after Budapest and cooled him off after Manhattan.

Slow, steady measuring of their heartbeats. Touch and silence and connection. It’s such a small thing, but it has always been what’s calmed the noise for both of them. After he’d retired and then struck the deal for house arrest, she had _missed_ this. Had thought more than once about asking Steve to try it with her on the bad days after Clint had retired, but she never did.

After a few minutes, Natasha’s calm enough to register details. 

Her hair is loose and longer than she’s worn it in years, a messy frizzing halo of red spilling over her shoulders. The bed they’re huddled in is the size of a small island and piled high with pillows. The windows are open but hidden by thick, overlapping branches of a pine - no surprise there – and the tiny glimpse of the sky just through the green needles is a misty, rainy grey. 

There’s a nightstand next to her with a green digital clock blinking 5:58AM. A bottle of lotion. A picture in a wooden frame. Books, lots of them.

She turns her head away before she can start reading the titles and looks back at their hands. Her nails are clipped short, almost past the quick, and they’re covered in lemon-yellow polish that someone applied in uneven glops. It’s chipping off. 

Natasha cannot imagine anything that would possess her to paint her nails this color.

Clint’s fingers tap once against the thin skin at her wrist, gently. Her pulse has slowed; she’s breathing normally again, but none of the rest of it has cleared itself up at all. _A nightmare_ , Clint said. And it’s not unusual for a nightmare to be vivid, to take a minute or so to shake off again, but the moments are ticking on and nothing is clicking into place. There is Steve’s crumpling body and the smell of death and dirt all around her, and then – 

And then this. 

She squeezes Clint’s hands, because this much feels real, and he switches his grip so he can lace their fingers together. It’s easier to look at his hands than his face; she doesn’t want to read the worry that she knows will be there. 

Looking at his hands from this angle, though, presents an entirely new problem.

His wedding ring was gold. 

Clint almost never wore it unless he was at the farm, which Natasha used to tease him sort of defeated the purpose of having a wedding ring at all. Laura’s ring matched it. She knows what those rings looked like; she’d sat at the farmhouse table more than once, having coffee while Laura polished them up, a deeply unsubtle gesture. After Laura and the kids disappeared in the snap, Clint had kept it in a box in with his kit. He hadn’t put it back on. 

But he’s wearing a ring now; hammered silver and much more slender. 

And its twin is on Natasha’s hand. Specifically, on her only finger where the nail polish isn’t a mess.

“Better?” Clint asks. 

“Not enough to count,” she tells him, lifting her head. “This isn’t residual nightmare jitters, Clint. Something’s really wrong with me.”

She’d almost forgotten this, how good Clint is at taking things in stride. “Okay,” he says, and squeezes her hands again. “It’s gonna be okay, Nat. I promise. Let me just…”

He drops a kiss on her forehead and clambers out of the bed, which she wasn’t expecting, then grabs a crumpled undershirt off the floor, tugging it on quickly. He’s wearing boxers with arrows all over them, which she shouldn’t find reassuring, but does. 

“Are you – where are you going?” she asks. It annoys her that she’s nervous.

“I’m gonna run interference. Give you a couple minutes and see if it helps shake it loose,” he says. “But I’ve gotta get out there before – ”

The door to the bedroom flies open.

“I stayed in my room as long as I could but I saw the six on the clock and you said I can come in if it’s a six!” a tiny voice chirps, and suddenly a little blur is grabbing the edge of the blanket, using it to spelunk up the side of the bedframe and then hurling against her body.

Clint scrubs a hand back through his hair, looking at her sheepishly. “Before he wakes up,” he finishes. “Whoops.”

_He._

The blur is a boy. A tiny boy in pajamas printed with blue trucks and lightning bolts, snuggling into Natasha’s body like it would never occur to him that he wouldn’t be welcome. His little arms are around her waist and he’s gotten comfortable, somehow wiggled his way under the blankets and against her side as though she’s a human pillow. His hair, Natasha sees, her sense of panic renewing itself, is also a messy halo of dark red curls.

“Mama, move up, please,” he demands. “Not enough lap.”

Natasha can’t speak. 

She looks to Clint and in this moment, she doesn’t recognize herself. She has no control over her features, there’s no deep, bottomless well of calm inside that she can draw on. There is blind terror radiating out of her, and she lets Clint see it because she has no idea how to get on top of it.

Clint’s face changes in an instant. 

She sees it slam into him like a wall, this paralyzing realization that whatever’s wrong is much larger and much worse than either of them understood. 

“Ben,” he says. It takes him a moment; he has to clear his throat. “Mama’s not feeling so good this morning.”

He sounds rough and awful; it’s patently obvious to Natasha that he’s desperately concerned, but the boy – Ben – doesn’t seem to notice the shift. “Are you sick?” he says, reaching up to pat her face. His hand is so small. He can’t be more than – three? Four at the most. Natasha remembers Lila at this age, vividly. “Can I stay with you? I can help.”

“Let’s go make breakfast instead, bud, what do you say?” Clint says, bending down to scoop the boy up with his tattooed arm. Easily. Naturally. “You can watch some cartoons.”

“It’s _morning_ ,” Ben says. “Mama, no TV in mornings, right?”

The hell of it is that Natasha is actually good with kids. 

Great with them, even. She adored Clint’s kids – even now, it gives her a horrible pang of grief to have to put it in past tense. She had loved those children, and she hadn’t even loved them just because they were his. She had been an excellent aunt, she could make snacks and read books and fix skinned knees with the best of them. She’s never been the kind of adult that didn’t know how to talk to a kid on their level.

But this toddler is looking at her _expectantly_ , clearly needing her to up her level of participation, and her brain has blitzed out. 

“Uh, it’s…it’s okay for now,” she says, and is so frustrated with herself for not being able to pull it together. To treat this like it’s any other cover, any other job. What the hell is the point of her if she can’t deceive an actual child?

He frowns and squirms a little in Clint’s arms, and the suspicious expression on his tiny face is _so exactly_ her own that she is going to lose it entirely in another minute. 

“It’s okay,” she repeats, trying to find some gentler tone. “I just need a little more sleep and then…”

She’s not sure what’s really covered by _and then_ , but it appeases the boy enough for Clint to set him down on the ground. “Waffles?” he begs Clint. 

“Waffles,” Clint agrees. “Go on downstairs, watch whatever you want.”

He bolts from the room as quickly as he came in, leaving Natasha and Clint staring at each other in the most crushingly awful silence in the entirety of their partnership. 

“You don’t know Ben,” he says. “The rest of it isn’t, uh, isn’t great, but. You don’t recognize _Ben_. At all?”

She shakes her head. 

Clint nods once, jerkily, as though it’s a blow he can’t figure out how to absorb. “I’ll call Shuri. Right now.”

“She’s alive?” Natasha asks, startled. “Clint – did we win?”

He’s quiet for a long moment. Too long.

“Sort of,” he finally says. His voice is thick and he hurries from the room before she can ask him to define it.

* * *

It happens to be a week that Shuri’s at her lab in Oakland, which is a stroke of luck; when Clint brings Natasha a plate piled with golden-brown waffles a little later (apology waffles, clearly, for fleeing from the room entirely instead of answering more uncomfortable questions, but she won’t make him say it), he tells her that Shuri should be flying into their place within the hour.

 _Their_.

Natasha doesn’t ask where they actually are. She doesn’t want to upset him more than he already is. He’s wearing it well, but Clint Barton hasn’t been a mystery to her since about four months from the day they first met.

He leaves her alone for the wait. She wouldn’t have minded if he’d stayed with her; she has more questions, even though they both know better than to muddy up the works before they’ve run any tests, but there’s a little boy downstairs who needs to be supervised and it’s not a great idea, for any of them, if Natasha…

So she stays in the bedroom. 

When she finally decides to get dressed, the jeans she finds are two sizes bigger than they were the last time she wore pants; buttoning them up is the first time she really notices her body, beneath the pajamas. Her stomach muscles are still defined, but her belly’s softer, somehow, and her hips and ass are noticeably broader. Silvery stretch marks streak her torso, and in the mirror, she sees faint tiny lines bracketing her eyes.

She raises a leg experimentally to rest a heel on the top of the dresser, which is almost as tall as she is. The denim pulls at her waist, protesting the stretch, but it’s still an easy movement. She can feel that her center of gravity has changed, but the flexibility and strength of her thighs hasn’t.

Natasha goes back to rummaging through the clothes. Her underwear drawer looks like it normally does, a mix of pragmatic daywear and special-occasion sexy, but there are several beige, fraying nursing bras she unearths from the back that make her yank her hands out like she’s been burned. She braids her hair to keep it out of her face, then pulls on a stretchy black tank top and zips one of Clint’s hoodies up over it – this, at least, she recognizes, she’s stolen this hoodie plenty of times in recent history.

When she sits back on the edge of the bed, forcing herself to eat the waffles, she finally lets herself make a thorough inspection of the nightstand. 

It’s a lot of picture books – Dragons Love Tacos, The Day The Crayons Went On Strike, nothing Natasha is familiar with, and there are about six more stacked on top of them. A thick volume of some parenting tome that she can’t even pretend isn’t hers, because there’s a bookmark in it and Clint always dog-ears the pages. Bill Bryson, which is sort of comforting, because _that_ much feels like her, and Joanne Harris, which does, too.

It takes Natasha a moment to steel herself before she finally picks up the photo in the wooden frame.

The shot is black and white. Her hair is pulled up into a sloppy bun, wisps frizzing out all around it. She looks sweaty, exhausted, and radiantly happy. Clint’s face is only half-visible; his forehead is pressed to her temple, nose smushed against her cheek and he’s cupping her head with one hand, grinning a wild, disbelieving grin. They’re both staring down at the burrito-wrapped baby in her arms, his tiny face squinched up in a yawn.

The baby is wearing a very undignified hat. The hat really bothers her. 

The hat is the only thing she can understand right now, so the hat is taking all of her ire. 

Whirring engines cut through the rustle of the wind, the faint splatter of raindrops against the windows – Shuri, finally arriving, and Natasha’s grateful for the excuse to think about anything else. She tosses the frame onto the bed and hurries out the door, turns right at the creaking wooden staircase just down the hall. 

It’s her first look at the rest of the house. It’s so obvious that a child lives here – nothing is white, there are several suspicious looking crayon markings on some of the walls, toys scattered here and there – but the rest is enough to give her pause. It’s not an obvious sort of beauty, maybe, and it’s nothing like the farm, but it’s… comfortable. It’s like a cabin, really, only it’s a little too big to qualify as one. Wooden beams and a sloping ceiling, the walls painted in soft creams and yellows and enormous windows flooding the place with light, even on this drizzly morning. The couches are warm brown leather, one matching armchair, a stone-hewn fireplace…

She told Steve once that if she ever settled anywhere – somewhere more permanent than one of her many boltholes scattered around the globe – a fireplace would be non-negotiable. It looks too much like what she would have picked out, if she ever planned to stay somewhere long enough to bother much about making it into a home. 

It feels like someone fucking with her head.

This should have all the hallmarks of it, everything she remembers from the Red Room, but there is nothing vague about this. There are smells, tastes, changes to her body that she can see and feel. It’s all clear and extremely specific. It _feels_ real, in a way she can’t quantify other than that it doesn’t line up with what she’s experienced when her memories were altered in her youth.

This is something that’s been snipped out with surgical precision, and that was never what the Red Room felt like. When her brain was played with as a child, as a teenager, everything surrounding it was a blur, like a watercolor bleeding out runny. It was always fuzzy. A camera lens just out of focus where belief was still the better option, even if it was never quite right. 

This is like the skip on a playlist from song to song. Every tracklisting between her howl of grief and waking up in bed with Clint this morning is just – cleanly erased, with nothing else substituted in.

But none of it makes sense, and Natasha hates it when there’s not a throughline. If someone was playing with her head, how would they know to put in a stone fireplace but _not_ know that a child is a physical impossibility? If her brain is spinning wild scenarios, why would it be Clint in bed with her and not – Scott, or Thor, or Rhodey?

 _You know goddamn well why it wouldn’t be anyone else_ , the traitorous part of her brain whispers, and she hisses at it to lock itself down.

The boy is on his stomach on the plush carpet. Clint managed to get him dressed at some point, and his eyes are riveted to the TV as he drags a chunk of waffle back and forth through a puddle of syrup, drowning it. “Hey, don’t play with your food, little love,” she hears herself tell him, on autopilot, as though some other person entirely is speaking through her. “You’re gonna spill.”

“I’m _not_ ,” he grumps, but he puts the bite in his mouth anyway. 

A hand settles at her shoulder, and she turns; Clint’s come up behind her. “It’s so many windows,” Natasha says, because she doesn’t know what else to say. The flash that just came over her, the words that flowed out like she’s said them on a thousand other mornings. “This is a lot of exposure. Even with the treeline, are they – “

“Every single one of them is bulletproof glass,” Clint tells her, the corners of his mouth flicking up for just a second. “You had them all replaced before we even picked out furniture. You’re _you_ , Nat.”

“But we sleep with them open upstairs?”

“You like to hear the ocean,” he says, his mouth dropping back down like he’s just remembered that something’s broken. “Now, I mean. It took some time to feel safe enough to… But I mean – the security system’s more extensive than just the glass, and – “

“You hate sleeping with the windows open,” she says, hearing the own urgency creeping into her voice. “You and Laura argued about it all the time.”

Clint scrubs a hand back through his hair. “Jesus. I’d forgotten we used to fight about that, you’re right,” he says, sounding almost surprised. 

She swallows it back. “How many years?”

“Nat – til Shuri takes a look, it’s probably a bad idea for me to feed you any more information than I already have. You know that,” Clint says quietly, darting a look across the room, but Ben’s still contentedly toying with his waffles and humming along to whatever cartoon he’s chosen. “If it makes it worse…”

“Please,” she says, keeping a tight rein on it. “That’s all I want to know. It’s the last thing I remember, and I need to – I have to be on top of something. How many years since we went back for Thanos?”

Clint looks like he wants to hold firm. Maybe once, he would have. 

But he’s also looking at her in a way that is unbearable. She doesn’t know how to let Clint Barton look at her like this. She doesn’t know what to do under the force of it, how to break it down into something she can understand. 

She does, however, see an advantage she can press. 

She presses.

“Please,” she repeats, and lets her voice crack slightly. It’s not even acting, not really, though something in her gut twists uncomfortably. Not enough to stop her from doing it, but still. It’s been a long time since Clint was someone she tried to play.

“Six years,” he tells her. “It was six years ago.”

 _Six_.

The snap, to the best of Natasha’s recollection, was four years back.

Which means it’s not surprising that a decade out, he’s forgotten a few details about his dead wife.

 _Six_.

There’s a knock at the door before Natasha can process. Clint squeezes her shoulder once more and goes to open it. 

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Shuri says, breezing in with very tall, lithe man that Natasha doesn’t recognize following closely behind her. She plants a kiss on Natasha’s cheek in greeting, which is – more familiar than they’ve ever been, but not unwelcome. If six years feels like an unbelievable passage of time, here’s the evidence: Shuri’s braids are still coiled up into two buns atop her head, her smile is still open and warm, her clothes are still fresh and youthful, but she’s so thoroughly – adult. She’s carrying a black case, which she sets on the ground at their feet. “I thought I’d swing by Berkeley and bring you a babysitter so we could work.”

“A babysitter?” Natasha asks. 

“She said I’d be her _lab tech_ ,” the man says. “I flub one compound equation on my O-chem practical and I lose all your respect from now until the end of time?”

“Yes, that’s pretty much correct,” Shuri tells him. 

“You see how hard she bullies me, Nat, this is _bullying_ ,” he says cheerfully, smiling. “I hate her so much. She’s lucky she’s got a plane.”

“I built the plane, Peter,” Shuri tells him, fondly rolling her eyes in a way that makes her look sixteen again. “How is that luck?”

“Jesus. _Parker_?” Natasha chokes out, interrupting their banter.

His face falls as he shoots an uncertain look at Clint. “Um – well, I mean. Yeah. Who else?”

The last time Natasha saw Peter Parker, he was a junior in high school who addressed her, in full, as _yes m’am Miss Black Widow or Miss Romanoff if you prefer m’am_ every single time he spoke to her. The person in front of her is muscled like a gymnast and several inches taller, easily in his twenties, vividly alive. She pictures Tony, his jaw clenched and eyes filled with rage as he clutched a photograph in his hands. She sees him mourning the man that this sweet, earnest boy would never grow up to become, and…

And here he is. Here they both are. Clint prepared her for Shuri, but this – this is - 

“I told you guys,” Clint says, still quietly, and settles a hand at the small of her back. “She doesn’t remember.”

Peter and Shuri exchange a look that she can’t quite decipher. 

Over by the TV, Ben finally looks up from his waffles. His face bursts into a blindingly joyful smile as he scrambles to his feet. “Peter!” he shouts, streaking across the room to start scaling his legs, like a monkey. “Dad didn’t say you were gonna be here! Did you come to play with me?”

Peter, at least, brightens as he lifts Ben up, balancing him on his hip like he does this all the time. “Hey, it’s my buddy Benji Barton!” he says. “Look, between you and me, I would _love_ to hang with you today, but I think Shuri’s gonna need - ”

“Shuri’s going to need you to clear out and enjoy the science museum and bring me back lots of pictures of sharks,” Shuri says, reaching out to ruffle Ben’s hair. It makes him giggle. “Can you be responsible for Peter for the whole day?”

Ben nods, beaming. 

“You know what, fine. Joke’s on you, we’d rather go to the museum anyway,” Peter says defiantly. “And you’re giving us money for snacks.”

“No. I’m not.”

“I’m officially un-asking you to be my best man.”

Shuri shrugs. “I’ll be MJ’s maid of honor. She’ll be into it. What else you got?”

“A deep seated sense of regret that I ever introduced you two,” Peter says, and shifts Ben to his other hip. “Okay, my dude. Let’s hit the road while the adults do adult things.”

“Wait,” Natasha says, the panicky sensation fluttering its wings low in her stomach. 

Even if this is entirely in her head. Even if this is some sort of Jacob’s Ladder death dream. Even if this is the result of someone using her brain as their personal jungle gym yet _again_ \- 

It is a world of even-ifs, but she stretches her hands out and he immediately defects from Peter, jumping into her arms and tucking his face against her shoulder, his legs dangling onto her hips. This child with her hair and expressions, with Clint’s eyes and laugh. The warm weight of him is so solid, so real. The baby shampoo smell of his hair, the splotches of syrup on the edges of his sleeves, and her arms lock around him instinctively, a need. 

She holds him fiercely enough that she’s surprised he doesn’t protest. 

Clint strokes his hand against her back, once, as though he understands even though _she_ doesn’t understand. “He’ll be perfectly safe with Peter, Tasha,” he murmurs. “Babysitters don’t come with higher qualifications than ‘is Spider-Man’.”

Her mouth tightens.

“I promise,” Clint says, still soothing, low. “They do this a lot. He’ll have a nice time.”

“We’ll bring you a present, Mama,” Ben tells her. “A good one.”

Everything in her body rebels at the thought of handing him back over. Of letting him out of this house with someone she hasn’t personally quizzed, when they’re heading to a location she hasn’t vetted, but the three adults are looking at her like she’s gone mildly feral and she doesn’t want to worry the kid – the morning’s been unsettling enough. 

She forces her arms to relax as she sets Ben back on the ground. “Be good, okay?” she says. 

“No!” he giggles, then takes Peter’s hand to start dragging him towards the front door. 

“Take an umbrella,” Clint calls after them. “Ben – let Peter put on your raincoat, come on. Cooperate.”

“Nooooooo,” Ben sings back, and she can hear Peter laughing as the heavy door clicks shut behind them. As soon as it does, Shuri picks up the case, her cheer tamped down. 

“How do I know this isn’t all in my head,” Natasha says, point blank. 

“I don’t think you do,” Shuri tells her, mouth twisting with sympathy. “And I don’t know if there’s anything we can say to convince you.”

“Bullshit,” Clint interjects. “We’ve both played real-or-not-real enough times that we’ve got Olympic golds. We’ve got about a thousand code words, emergency scenarios, signals - ”

“And if this is in my head, I’d know those things, too,” Natasha interrupts. “If it’s a fantasy, of course it would all be right.”

Clint’s jaw twitches and clenches back up. “Since when don’t you trust me?”

“She doesn’t trust _herself_ ,” Shuri interrupts, and Natasha looks at her with surprise and gratitude. “I’m sorry. I get that this is a trash fire, for both of you, and I understand you’re worried for your son, but if we can rule out a few things and keep calm while we’re learning –”

“ _I get it_ ,” Clint says, his patience fraying around the edges. It makes Natasha want to touch him back, take his hand or rest the point of her chin against his shoulder. Nothing she would have thought twice about doing until she woke up in a wedding ring that made every gesture loaded. 

Shuri nods, gracefully switching subjects. “Natasha, I know what Clint said on the phone, but tell me yourself. When you woke up this morning, the last thing you remember was…?” 

“I was on Titan. Steve took a hit, so I broke from position. Things with Thanos were not going well.”

“They really weren’t,” Clint says. “That was not our best day.”

“Well, it also wasn’t your worst,” Shuri says crisply. “Let’s get this brain map started. People don’t just wake up with six years of their life missing all at once. With any luck, we’ll figure it out in enough time to meet the boys in Portland by lunch. And I’ll preemptively nominate Peter to pay for the celebratory oysters.”

 

to be continued.

  
  
  


  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, this one's not getting finished before Engame. I'm sorry, guys. I am not fast enough and as per usual, I never correctly estimate how many words I'm gonna need. ONWARD.

  
  
  


After scanning, mapping, testing, poking, and prodding have yielded exactly zero results, Shuri seems considerably less confident they’ll make it out of the house in time for lunch. She’s frustrated, which is clear; Natasha can also see there’s part of her that’s intrigued at the idea of getting to play with a puzzle of this magnitude. 

To Shuri’s credit, she’s trying to clamp down on _that_ part, obviously aware of the insensitivity and the very real pain this is causing for people that she loves. She’s doing her best not to show it, but she didn’t become this brilliant without a deep-rooted sense of intellectual curiosity, and eventually, Natasha reaches the end of her own tether. 

She tugs the tiny electrode from her forehead, looping its cord around her fingers. “Still nothing?”

“Nothing that could lead me in a direction, no. But for someone who’s taken as many hits over the years as you have, this is an annoyingly healthy brain,” Shuri says, not looking up from her laptop. “All your hormonal levels, activity functions, no change in the scarring patterns – and those are old news, they’re exactly the same as they were in your old SHIELD medical files, I ran a comparative analysis. Did you get an Eternal Sunshine or something?”

“Those are from when I was a kid.” It causes Shuri to look up, surprised. “It was not a great childhood.”

“Evidently. Shit.”

Clint comes in from the kitchen, carrying two mugs and a juice glass in his hands. “Is that a good shit?” he asks, a little hopeful. “Something happen?”

“Sorry. Just the same _shit_ I always say whenever your wife reminds me that the technological advancements I’ve dedicated my life to creating will also be useful to unscrupulous assholes,” Shuri says, reaching out to take one of the mugs. 

“Can you not call me that?” Natasha snaps. Both of them turn to look at her, startled. She curls the cord more tightly around her fingers, tight enough that the tip starts to go numb. 

There’s not a word, for what she wants to say. _It’s too weird_ isn’t quite right, and neither is _too awkward_. But as far as she remembers, she’s no one’s wife and never imagined she ever would be. Hearing it in reference to Clint - it’s too something and she doesn’t have the capacity right now to put a point on whatever it is. It’s just _too_.

“Got it, of course,” Shuri says quickly, smoothing over the moment, and Natasha stands up so she can looks away from Clint . She doesn’t want to see the hit she knows she just landed. He didn’t deserve it, and even so, she couldn’t have bit it back.

He hands Natasha the glass he’s carrying and doesn’t meet her eyes. “Just water,” he says. “I thought caffeine might fuck with the thing, but if you want a sip of mine – ”

“It’s fine,” she says. “Thank you.”

“Course.” 

Natasha swirls the water around, watching the ice bob to the surface and clink against the sides. “What now?”

“I don’t know. Which I hate saying, but I don’t know,” Shuri says. “Clint, you’re sure nothing unusual happened yesterday? At all?”

“We didn’t even leave our _property_ yesterday,” he says. “Ben’s preschool was closed so Nat decided not to go to work. We did a bunch of laundry, cleaned out the garage, taught him how to play Uno, ran around outside – she didn’t eat or drink anything weird, either. She skipped breakfast, all three of us had grilled cheese and strawberries for lunch, and dinner was leftovers from the night before.”

“Work,” Natasha interrupts. “I didn’t go to work. I can’t believe we didn’t think to – I have to call Steve. Maybe he woke up with the same thing.” 

It’s a relief to think it; surely someone else on the team has her same symptoms, and surely even if she and Clint are living on the west coast, she and Steve are still a team. That should have been her very first move. She supposes she can forgive herself for being a little slow to get there with all the other information to process, but still, she makes a mental note to apologize to him. 

_The kid thing threw me off_ will be a pretty good excuse, though, and Steve will make a disbelieving noise, but he’ll say something reassuring. She already feels better, thinking that there’s a chance - a good chance – she won’t be alone in her confusion. 

She hands the cord back to Shuri, and when she turns to ask Clint where she keeps her phone, it is all over his face. 

It’s strange that she doesn’t feel it. 

She doesn’t feel anything. 

“No,” she says, flatly. As though she’s contradicting him about a plot point on a TV show, about some subject that doesn’t actually matter but she still wants everyone to be clear on the fact that she’s right. “No.”

“Natasha.”

“ _No_ ,” she emphasizes. Her brain is enshrouded in fog. She speaks seventeen languages but she can’t make something else come out. “No, no. No. Nononononono.” It doesn’t sound like a word. Saying it too many times in a row stretches and pulls it into some droning nonsense syllable that doesn’t mean anything at all. It’s only a noise.

A drone. 

A plea. 

Clint’s stepping toward her. The expression on his face is leveling, and it crashes over her: a wave she has no hope of surviving. She will drown when it curls over on itself and there is no reason to go down fighting.

And she knows, then. She understands.

If this was a fantasy. A dream. Someone fucking with her head. Any of the other possibilities she’s considered, this would not be part of it. This would never be part of it. This is the ugliest kind of truth, and if this was a shelter her mind wove for itself, it would have been all-encompassing. It would be telling her that when she watched him fall six years ago, it turned up okay, because she ran fast enough and she fought hard enough and she reached his side in time enough.

She asked for proof. It was given: there is no such thing as a happy, cozy, perfect little world that would not include Uncle Steve as a regular player in her son’s life.

Her eyes are dry. Her body is in freefall.

She turns away from Clint, away from Shuri, and she walks out the front door.

* * *

The rain’s gotten worse, but not by much, and if Natasha’s brain is on leave right now, her body still carries her forward. The way has countless times before in the middle of a war, when there’s no space to use her brain and everything has to operate all on instinct. But it’s so quiet and still here; it’s nothing like a war.

 _Isn’t it?_ she thinks, and feels the corner of her mouth pull at one side. It’s something Steve would have said.

The house’s exterior is grey and it sits on a huge plot of land – nothing ahead of her but the grove of pines and Shuri’s sleek, sophisticated plane, parked on the wet grass like it’s nothing more than a car. There’s a sprawling wooden deck behind the house that escaped her earlier cursory examination. Blue and grey striped lawn chairs. An outdoor table where they probably eat dinner, in better weather. A hot tub. A nice one, it looks like. Probably good for Clint’s back muscles; they carry a lot of strain. 

She’s still moving, she realizes. There’s thick, scrubby greenery surrounding the deck, and she can see a well-trodden sand path scraped out through the underbrush, cutting through the mean little thorns. It leads down to the ocean and she follows it. 

She’s not sure how long she walks. She’s not sure how far.

When her legs give out, it surprises her. It’s like someone simply swung a blade and cleaved them from beneath her, but it’s painless and she drops, crumpling over. Knees bent under her body, her forehead against the wet sand.

Natasha wants to scream. 

She is so wrenchingly envious of this other version of herself; this six-years-older Natasha, who went shopping for lawn chairs and waffle irons and nursing bras, with the faint wrinkles and the bigger ass and the grief that must have dulled itself into something manageable over all this time. Who’s learned how to live in a world without the man who became her best friend and touchstone and the only person other than Clint to ever look her in the eyes, tell her he trusted her, and prove it. Over and over again. 

Steve had trusted her to save his life. He’d said so. He meant the things he said.

Six years gone and there’s no one she can make bleed for this. She can’t hunt down Thanos and take her pound of flesh in every lesson she carried with her out of the Red Room. There is nowhere to put the weight of her failure besides squarely on her own shoulders.

She wants to scream, but it will change nothing, so she doesn’t.

When she finally sits back up, she pulls her arms around her knees and tries to slow her breathing. No one else is on the beach in this weather; maybe no one would be, anyway, it’s not a particularly friendly-looking beach. It’s flat, hard-packed sand and it’s covered with jagged rocks. 

That’s probably what she and Clint liked about it.

The rain dapples the sand in little pockets all around her. It looks like the pattern beaten into her wedding ring, and she turns it in circles with her thumb. The skin under it is smooth and very pale, almost slippery.

When she sees Clint approaching a while later, it’s not a surprise. She tries to hold onto that: whatever the world, whatever the circumstance, miles between them or missing memories, continents or years, they will always come after each other. That much still makes sense.

He plunks himself gracelessly into the sand beside her. “I used to think nothing was going to be worse than watching you watch it happen,” he says bluntly. “And then today I got to break the news to you.”

“Worst of both worlds,” she says. Her voice comes out a croak. 

“Our kind of luck,” Clint agrees. “I thought we’d turned that around the last couple years. I guess something’s always coming for us one way or another.”

She nods once and turns her eyes back to the water, the waves throwing themselves angrily onto the boulders, whipped up by the storm. “Tell me who else.”

“Tony, Bruce, and Scott,” he says, and in this moment – even as this crushing sensation inside her chest grinds itself up with every new name – she loves him. She loves him for the lack of hesitation in his voice; loves him for not trying to spare her the pain and his innate understanding that delaying it would spare her nothing; loves him for how much it must cost him to relive it and how he does it without flinching.

He knows her. Whatever the fuck they are to each other.

Natasha leans her shoulder against his, and now he does hesitate, but he slowly takes her silent cue and wraps his arm around her, tightly. “And even so, it still didn’t bring back everybody who dusted. Not the world over and not with our people. Laura and the kids, they didn’t make it. Neither did Wanda and Viz, but…”

_Did we win?_

_Sort of._

“But Peter,” she says. “And Shuri. T’Challa?”

“Yeah. Nakia, too, that’s his queen. Some of Rocket’s team. And Bucky, and Sam,” he tells her. “They live together, by the way. Together-together.”

“What? _No_.”

“Yeah. You’ve never seen a guy more pissed off about falling in love than Sam Wilson,” Clint says, and Natasha laughs.

She laughs, and she laughs, and she’s not aware of the point where it turns into a sob, but once it does, she is horrified to realize that she can’t hold it back. She can’t lock it up or strangle it: she is sobbing into Clint’s shoulder, her body twisting up with it, keening animal sounds of grief forcing their way out of her and it makes her feel like the same strange foreign creature who Ben climbed in bed to cuddle with.

He holds her and he doesn’t try to shush or soothe it away. He bends his body around hers in a protective curve and doesn’t try to make her rage and sorrow go away; he joins her inside it. 

This isn’t just grief for her friends, her family; this is for herself, too, and it’s tipped her all the way over. It’s too big to be contained and it has to force itself out. It’s such an ancient hurt, a bruise she’s never expected would burst open. 

Natasha had clawed her way past this. She worked so hard to belong only to herself, to build something up from the place where pieces of her brain were pulled out and something, some _one_ else was shoved in. This is her oldest, ugliest fear come back to screaming life, and even if it’s been brought forth in the gentlest possible circumstance – in this comfortable little home, wrapped in Clint’s arms – it’s not lessened. She’s always been afraid that someone could rip part of her mind away again, that she would be helpless to stop it.

And now here she is. Again.

She’s sobbing herself ragged in Clint’s arms, and when the storm finally spends itself, she can barely face him through swollen, watery eyes. 

He should be looking at her and seeing something broken, but he’s just looking at her like she’s Natasha, and it’s almost enough to set her off again.

She wants to say something profound, or grateful, or even just something a little bit _nice_ , and “So a bunch more people we love died and we decided to celebrate by getting married?” is what comes out instead. 

Clint’s not fazed, though. “Is it really that hard for you to believe we’re in love?”

_No. Not at all. Not for me. That’s the problem._

Natasha shrugs.

“I could tell you about that, too,” he offers, a little quietly. “It’d be… it’d be a nicer story than all the other shit I had to tell you. I’d like telling you about us a lot more.”

She considers, for a moment. It’s a sweet offer. It is. But the amount she’s had to take in today isn’t leaving her with a lot of room to process anything else, even if it’s a nice thing, and the story of how Clint fell in love with her will inevitably lead to questions about Ben, and his conception, and her own body, and any goodness she could take out of it will be lost beneath all the rest of it. 

This has to be broken down in pieces. Natasha doesn’t know how to be anyone but herself about it. 

“Later,” she says, and wipes her eyes with the edges of her hands. “Sorry. Just – later.”

Clint nods, like he’s not surprised. The rain has blown down to a light misting; a bolt of lightning splits through the sky out over the sea, crackling all the way down until it looks like it pierces the water. The thunder that rumbles in the wake of it is low, almost sedate. It makes her think of Thor; a name that wasn’t on Clint’s list of the dead, and unexpectedly, it loosens something up under her ribcage. 

It’s something Steve would point out. _We’re not working with nothing here, Nat._

She closes her eyes. She misses him, and she knows that she hasn’t even scratched the surface of what it will mean to miss him. 

“What were we going to do today?” she asks Clint. “Before I woke up broken.”

“Hey. You aren’t broken,” he says sharply. Sharper than she expected, and it makes her turn to him, surprised. “We’ve been through worse than this, Natasha, and this gets to rattle us and throw us off, but we’re tough, and we’re parents, and there’s nothing so broken we don’t know how to work with it. We’re figuring this out. Don’t you ever call yourself _broken_ where I can hear you say it.”

“Okay,” she agrees. “Okay, Clint. I’m sorry.”

“Good,” he says. When she looks down, she can see that he’s burrowed his free hand all the way into the damp sand, like he needs to make a fist or clench around something too tightly, let out some of his own stress and fear and he’s been trying to do it unnoticed. 

It makes her feel painfully tender toward him. 

“I mean it, though,” she says. “Tell me that much. What we were going to do today.”

Clint blows out a quick huff of air. “Ben usually goes to preschool from nine to one. He loves it. They’re closed this week, though, a bunch of kids have the flu, and it’s not a huge town, so…”

“So they just didn’t open,” she prompts. As though she’s the one who knows anything here, as though she’s the guide. It should have occurred to her before now that Clint is suffering, too. 

“Yeah. And we need groceries, so one of us probably would have gone shopping and one of us would have stayed home with him.”

“And work? You said…”

“Right. Yeah.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “It’s not like we need the money or anything – well, you already know that. But you like having something to do, so you, uh, you teach yoga or dance a couple times a week.”

Natasha blinks. “Dance.”

“Never ballet,” Clint rushes to assure her, which helps enormously. “Not ever. And it’s not an academy or anything, it’s just a really tiny studio in town and a handful of people who like to exercise but aren’t that into a gym. One time you did private lessons with this guy who wanted to learn to tango as a surprise for his wife for their fiftieth anniversary.”

“I’m mediocre at the tango. At _best_ ,” she says. 

Clint finally smiles, a little. “You told him that, too. But it’s northern Oregon and like under a thousand people live here year-round, so a mediocre tango means you’re basically an Olympian.”

“They don’t have Olympics for dance.”

“Maybe they just need to see your tango.” 

“And the Avengers?”

“Still a thing. Carol’s running the show. It’s Carol, and her daughter Monica, she’s a hell of a pilot – ”

“Her kid’s old enough for that? Carol’s younger than I am.”

Clint waves a hand. “Jeremy Bearimy.”

“God, I hate metaphysical bullshit,” Natasha groans. “Whatever. Okay. Carol’s got a grown daughter.”

“And a wife, too. Noncombatant. Anyway – Carol, Monica, Peter, Bucky, Sam, and this kid Kate. Who stole my codename and some of my gear, incidentally, which I was okay with. You were begrudging, it was kind of cute.”

“But not us.”

“Not us,” he says. “Sometimes we lend a hand if it’s stuff we can do remotely, consulting or computer work, but when you got pregnant, we decided it was time to hang it up. And we were already living here anyway, well before Ben. I think – Steve, Tony, that last day. I think that was really the end for both of us.”

There are so many questions on that specific topic that she wants to come back to, but pacing herself was a rule she set, and so she nods, digesting it. 

“Do you still want to go get groceries together?” she asks. 

“Yeah,” Clint says, after a second. He sounds like he needs some normalcy as much as she does right now. “I really, really do.”

* * *

Natasha has lived in several one-bedroom apartments that were bigger than their local grocery store. There are no carts. The girl standing at the checkout counter waves at her and says “Afternoon, Missus Barton!” The baskets are made out of woven wooden strips, like something Little Red Riding Hood would carry; Clint hands her one and grabs a second for himself.

He navigates with a practiced efficiency, flipping open the egg cartons, checking expiration dates on the butter. Cherries, an onion, skinless chicken breasts, bagels, avocados, salt, tomatoes, olive oil, raspberry jam, mushrooms, string cheese – 

“String cheese?” she says, because she can’t help it. “Are you eight?”

“We have a kid,” he reminds her. 

“Ah. Right.”

“And even if we didn’t, it wouldn’t make string cheese less delicious.”

“Yeah, don’t come at me thinking I don’t know your ulterior motives in _any_ timeline, Barton,” she says, and he grins at her. It’s the first time he’s grinned all day, and she takes a beat to look at him, finally, with the same kind of assessment she gave herself when she was dressing. 

His hair’s grown back out; she’d liked it, shaved at the sides and spiked up, but she likes this, too, the way it curls just over the tops of his ears. There’s a little scruff around his chin and his upper lip, but it doesn’t seem intentional, more like he’s just been lazy about shaving for a couple days. Some of the lines in his face have deepened, but he doesn’t look markedly older, not to her. The last time she saw him, his body was all hard lines and muscles; the carried all his loss with him, the weight of it and it wrote itself out in brutal definition. She likes him better this way; he’s still lean and muscled, but it’s less punishing, now. He looks healthier. 

_He looks this way because of me._

The thought startles her.

The version of Clint she knows has really just started to settle into life without his family. He’s been trying for years, and he’s been trying for her, because he doesn’t want to be one more thing she worries about. But it’s still a gaping wound, one that she’s been too afraid to poke at. She’s let him have his coping mechanisms, his punishing workouts and new weapons and undereye circles, because she knows what it’s like to try and cut a new life out of whole cloth. He’s been doing his best at his own pace. 

This is a Clint that’s content with his life. Or he was until this morning.

The girl at the checkout counter rings them up lackadaisically; there’s no one in line behind them. “No Ben today?” she says. “Heard the school’s closed til tomorrow.”

“He’s on a playdate with one of his uncles,” Clint says. “They went to a museum.”

She smiles at them. “Every time I see him he’s telling me about some new aunt or uncle. You two must have had busy parents.”

Natasha snorts. It earns her a very weird look. 

“Guess so,” Clint says, smoothing it over.

The girl leaves an expectant space, like she’s waiting for Natasha to add something as though this is just…the kind of person Natasha is, someone who makes idle small talk with people in grocery stores. 

“You want me to just put this on your account?” she asks uncertainly, after the silence has gone on a little too long. 

“That’d be great, Anna, thank you,” Clint tells her. 

She bags everything up faster than she rang it through. “Feel better soon, Mrs. Barton,” she calls as they’re heading out the door, and Natasha gives a wave of acknowledgement. 

“You okay?” Clint asks. 

“I’m fine. But the Mrs. Barton thing,” Natasha says, rolling her eyes. “That’s actually something people call me? This is a way I’ve intentionally introduced myself to other humans. Seriously?”

Frustration shimmers over his face as he unlocks the trunk, loading up their bags. “I didn’t trick you into this, Nat. I didn’t _force_ you to marry me, okay?”

“I know that,” she says, taken aback. “Or I think I do, at least.”

“Yeah, well, you should know it.” He slams the trunk closed, flexing his fingers like he wants to make a fist. “Yes. It’s a way you _intentionally_ introduce yourself to people. Once upon a time, you were _actually_ pretty psyched about it.”

“Don’t be shitty to me,” she says. “I’m doing the best I can. It hasn’t even been twenty-four goddamn hours.”

“I’m still your best friend,” he says. “I remember the days leading up to the showdown with Thanos too, you know. I was there next to you. I remember what the four years after the snap were like, and I remember all the ones before that – Odessa, and Manhattan, and Budapest and every other fucking city. Everything you and I have ever been to each other – that’s not erased along with the last six years, Natasha, and you’re acting like – like – ”

“Like what?” she snaps. “What am I acting like, Clint?”

“Maybe you don’t remember me being your husband, but you sure as shit remember me being your partner,” he says. It’s almost a snarl. “And for the record, I know _exactly_ why this is a shit situation for you, but it’d be nice if you could pause for a second and remember that this is the second time in _my life_ that my family’s been fucked with in a way I can’t fix. If my wife doesn’t remember our marriage, it’d be nice to have my best friend remember a little bit about our history.”

It stops her cold in her tracks, the rising fury flooding out of her like it never existed. It may as well have been a slap; it wouldn’t have been undeserved. 

“You’re right,” she tells him. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Good,” he says. 

When he turns to look at her, though, there’s no anger in him, not anymore. It’s only sorrow, and worry – for himself, for his family, for his son who is not his first son and not his first child and is the only one of them he has left to protect, and Natasha raises a hand to touch his cheek before she can think the better of it. 

“I’m so sorry,” she repeats, quietly. “I am, Clint. You’re still my best friend, too. Of course you are.”

He curls his fingers around her wrist, holding on. 

“Thank you,” he tells her. “Thanks.”

* * *

Peter and Shuri have enough sense not to stick around for dinner, much to Ben’s disappointment. Still, his mood from a day in a science museum with Peter, looking at sharks and dinosaur bones and doing baby-size experiments was too good to be dampened by anything. He’s come back hyped on sugar, with countless stories spilling out of him and a tiny geode in a paper bag for Natasha: the present he promised.

“I told you it’d be a good one, Mama,” he says proudly, crawling onto her lap when the rock spills out from the bag into her hand. “Look, you open it up like this – ” He takes it from her to tug the two pieces aside, revealing the interior as though it’s a magic trick. 

Maybe to him it is, she realizes. He’s four. The whole world is still new to him.

“And see, inside it sparkles,” he says, finishing with a flourish. “Also there’s purple. Do you like it?”

“I love it,” Natasha tells him, meaning it. “It’s beautiful.”

He beams at her, shining with the satisfaction of a job well done. It’s Clint’s smile on his face and there is nothing about him that’s not an absolute miracle. 

She never thought about having children. 

Why would she waste the time? She couldn’t, so: end of story. Natasha has always been more comfortable living in that what-is instead of the what-if; there was never anything to be gained by playing out a possibility that didn’t exist. And now it’s entirely beside the point to ask herself if she ever really _wanted_ to be a mother: she’s woken up to find that she already is, and it’s terrifying and too much and there will never be a break from it, there will never be a pause, it is a lifelong commitment that she doesn’t remember signing on for and anything without an exit clause makes her nervous.

She spent enough time at the farm to be sure she’d never become someone who romanticized parenting. It was work. A lot of it was thankless. 

But now she’s holding her son in her arms, and she has a list of rationalizations and reluctances that are doing nothing to downplay what it feels like to hold a child and know that he belongs to her.

Natasha thought Ben would be the hardest thing about any of it, but loving this little boy is the easiest and most instinctive thing she’s ever done.

“Can I put him to bed?” she asks Clint, tentatively, after Ben scampers upstairs to put on his own pajamas – he insisted he could do it himself. “Would that be okay with you?”

“Of course it’s okay,” Clint tells her, without hesitation. Things between them are still – tremulous, a little, still shaky. The fact that his answer comes so quickly is a balm over some sore places. “He likes that book on our nightstand.”

“Dragons Love Tacos?”

“That’s the one.” His grin is crooked and wry, a little sad. “No doubt that he’s my son with a pick like that, right?”

“I didn’t doubt that for a second even without supporting evidence,” she says. “He’s you. When he laughs – it’s you in miniature. He’s so beautiful, Clint.”

Clint swallows. She sees it, and it makes her want to go to him. Touch him. _Tell him_ \- 

“ _I’m ready for my books, I want three!_ ” Ben hollers down the stairs. 

“Nice try, kid!” Natasha yells back up, on instinct. “You’re getting two and you know it. It’s late and it’s a school night.”

“Maaaaammmmaaaaaa, no faaaaair,” he wails dramatically. “I _need_ all of them.”

“Yeah, that’s you, all right,” Natasha tells Clint. “You sounded exactly like that every time I told you that we weren’t doing pizza for dinner four nights in a row.”

Clint’s mouth twitches like he wants to laugh, like he would if things were a little less heavy. “Can I ask – it’s a favor.”

“Hmm?”

“I know it’s still strange, but can you just.” He scrubs a hand over his chin, a mirror of his gesture on the beach this afternoon; a mirror of every time he’s been nervous to say something. He was right. Whatever else is happening, this is still Clint. She still knows him better than anyone. 

“It’s all right,” she says, quietly. “Ask me.”

“Please don’t sleep on the couch tonight,” he says. “Stay in our bed with me. I won’t – I’m not gonna try to – ”

“God, no, I didn’t think you would,” she rushes to assure him, their words lapping over each other. 

“I’d just – ”

“No, I’d feel better too – ”

“So it’s – ”

“Yes.”

He looks relieved. “Yes?”

“It’s not the first time we’ll have ever shared a bed,” she reminds him. “Not even for me.”

“And who knows. Maybe you’ll wake up tomorrow…”

“And it’ll be okay,” she says, then pauses. “See? We still finish each other’s – ”

“Tacos,” Clint offers, and for a moment, they smile at each other. Shyly, like teenagers at the end of a first date when they’re not positive it’s gone well and are still pretty sure it hasn’t gone badly. 

“You’re stalling!” Ben yells down the stairs. “I better not get only one book because you’re slow, Mama!”

“He’s demanding, huh?” she says. 

“Oh, just wait,” Clint tells her. “You’ve got no idea.”

  
  
  


to be continued.

  
  
  



	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys, been gone while, I know. Here's the deal re: Endgame. Natasha Romanoff is my favorite fictional character of all time, for very many reasons. I was furious about this movie, in equal measure to my heartbreak at the disservice it heaped onto a founding member of the Avengers, in a myriad of ways that went well past what happened at the 90 minute mark. It just kept crapping on her, long after That Scene and it did not let up. It felt personal.
> 
> But this note is mostly to say that I don't really want to talk about it, so I hope that's cool with everyone. tl;dr it sucked and I'm still really sad and really angry.
> 
> It also changed a little bit of the trajectory of this story; think of it now as less Endgame-spoilery and more my spin on Endgame that doesn't feature a whole bunch of what actually went down in Endgame! That's what I decided to do, when I got a little lost over some plot points.
> 
> I also would normally never post a note with this caveat because generally, I'm big on just letting my story be my story and letting it fold as it may, but so many of us took such a fucking brutal hit that I want to assure any reader out there who's struggling: while I know things are often never exactly _easily resolved_ in the fic I write, you're safe here. You're safe in this one. There's gonna be stuff, but I want to promise you that _Natasha is fine_ in this. I want to promise you that I've got her. I want to promise you that I'm not going to fail her, too.
> 
> Also thank you to Taylor Swift for releasing a song this week that made me go _fiiiiine, I think I can write something again._
> 
> Thor is now the only living Avenger not currently on my shitlist,  
> anothercover

  
  
  


When Natasha wakes up the next morning, nothing has changed. 

Nothing changes the morning after that, or the one after that, or the next, and by the time Monday rolls around, both she and Clint have given up hoping that whatever’s been carved away only needs a good night’s sleep to come back.

It’s wearing on her by then; not only the sheer frustration that comes along with a chunk of her life missing, but from the effort it takes to keep Ben from figuring out that she’s not quite right. Which doesn’t seem like it should be any kind of contest – Natasha’s gone toe-to-toe with the god of lies himself and come out the victor; Ben is a four year old whose primary interests are dragons and grilled cheese. 

Unfortunately, he’s also _her_ child, which means he’s a deeply observant and suspicious little shit.

Natasha’s trying to get him dressed on Monday, his first day back at preschool since she’s woken up without her memories. She felt like she shouldn’t stick Clint with all the work just because she’s still at loose ends; he volunteered to make breakfast, which Natasha agreed to because that seemed like the harder job in division of labor, and now she’ll probably stab him if she ever makes it down to the kitchen. What a fucking traitor.

“I won’t!” Ben insists for the hundredth time, folding his arms across his chest and glaring at her. “I won’t I won’t I won’t – ”

“It’s not even fifty degrees outside,” she says, voice straining with frustration. “You need to wear a sweater!”

“I _don’t_!” Ben argues. “I hate it! It looks dumb on me!”

“So _pick a different sweater_ ,” Natasha snaps. “You have multiple sweaters! The world is your oyster.”

“I hate oysters and I hate _every_ sweater, I won’t, I will _not_.”

“You can take it off once you get to school!”

He scowls at her and she grabs for him; negotiation isn’t working, she’s just going to wrestle him into this thing and solve it that way, which is of course when he starts howling. 

“ _Dadddddyyyyy_!” he screeches. “Mama is KILLING ME DEAD!”

“Aw, that sucks, I’ll miss you, bud!” Clint cheerfully calls up the stairs. Natasha’s definitely going to stab him. He could have helped, he knows she doesn’t know how to do this, she was always good with his kids but she was good in a Fun Aunt sort of way, and the Fun Aunt was not the one who had to negotiate with a tiny screaming terrorist at six thirty in the morning.

Finally, Ben’s head pops through the neck of the sweater. He stares at her balefully, as though he’s never been so betrayed in his life, and Natasha realizes he was right: the thing really does look stupid on him. 

God damn it.

“Do you want to wear long sleeves instead of a tee shirt and we’ll call it even?” she asks, after a second. Ben tugs off the offending item and throws it at her; she’s too surprised at the action to bat it away in time, and it smacks her full in the face. It’s not as though it hurts or anything, but still. “Hey! Not okay, Ben, we don’t throw – ”

“I _hate_ that sweater,” he says with a burst of baby frustration, suddenly verging on tears. “You know I hate it.”

It’s like being pricked with something sharp; all her annoyance rushes out of her at once and she feels like absolute shit. “Oh… hey. Hey, little love, come here,” Natasha says, and hold out her arms. Her stomach flips over with sudden fear – what if he doesn’t like her anymore, what if she actually _scared_ him – but Ben flies at her without hesitation, snuggling into her with his face tucked in the side of her neck, body heaving as he tries to calm himself down. 

She rubs his back, cradling him against her until he shushes. Life really must feel so deeply unfair sometimes, if you’re small. There are so few things kids have control over. It’s just a sweater. 

“I’m sorry,” Natasha tells him. “I’m so sorry I got impatient, Ben, are we still friends?”

“Are you and Daddy getting a divorce?” he mumbles. 

Natasha jolts. She actually physically jolts, like she’s been poked in the spine. “ _What_?”

Ben looks up at her and hiccups once, his lower lip trembling, and she understands suddenly that _this_ is the real cause of the tantrum; the sweater was just the nudge over the edge.

“Katniss R. said when parents stop kissing it means they’re getting a divorce,” Ben says miserably. “You and Daddy don’t kiss anymore.”

“Katniss _R_? There’s more than one Katniss in a preschool that’s small enough to close if too many kids get the flu?” Natasha asks before she can help herself, though that’s – not even close to the issue here. She sighs and strokes a hand through Ben’s hair, cuddling him in with her other arm. 

How physically affectionate must she and Clint have been for their small son to notice a change in just under a week? He’s been home more often than he otherwise would have been, so he’s had more time to observe them together, she supposes. She and Clint have always been tactile with each other, even before… and while she can’t imagine they’ve ever been inappropriate, especially not with a child in the house, they must have been even moreso as an actual couple.

But they’ve been overly careful about personal boundaries this week – well. _Her_ personal boundaries. No wonder Clint asked her to at least stay in their bed. 

“No,” Natasha tells him. “No, baby, we’re not getting a divorce.” The firmness in her own voice surprises her. 

“Promise?” Ben asks. 

It occurs to her that maybe this is a thing she shouldn’t promise, but the need to reassure him, to put a sense of rightness back into his world that’s been notably thrown off kilter, that’s bigger than anything else. That’s bigger than Natasha’s usual method of thinking of all angles, possibilities, outcomes, and she kisses his forehead. 

“I promise,” she says. “I love your dad like crazy. Tell Katniss R that your mama said she should zip it. Long sleeves now, okay?”

“Okay,” Ben agrees, then looks down at his feet. “Wait, my socks shouldn’t be matching. It’s too boring, I _hate_ it.”

It’s another ten minutes before they actually make it down to the kitchen. Clint’s got music playing while he’s dishing scrambled eggs onto plates and actually has the nerve to smile once they walk in. “I see Mama’s murder attempt was unsuccessful. Nice work.”

“Thank you,” Ben says, climbing up into his booster seat. He makes a face at his breakfast. “Do we got Pop Tarts?”

“Oh good, now it’s my turn for mutiny,” Clint says. “No, Ben, eat your eggs. You know the drill.”

Natasha touches Clint’s elbow. “Let him have them,” she says quietly, and Clint turns to look at her, surprised and maybe a little irritated, but Ben’s already clapping his hands in excitement, and she decides to open the pantry before they can get into it. There are three kinds of Pop Tarts in there; clearly Clint is not always this much of a hardass about dessert breakfast. “Just eat two bites of the eggs, deal? And then what are we thinking, the strawberry frosted ones?”

“S’mores,” Ben disagrees, and Natasha tears open the silver package to drop them in the toaster for him.

“I need you in the other room for a second,” she tells Clint, nodding her head towards the living room. He obliges, turning the music up a little bit before following along after her.

“Should I save the lecture about the importance of not undermining each other in front of our kid?” Clint asks, a little wry, one corner of his mouth tucked up. “He’s been off his schedule this week and getting him back on it always means the first day is a series of battles.” He’s wearing jeans that ride low on his hips and a black tee shirt; it shows off the bold edges of his tattoo sleeve, the lines a little more faded and less clean than she remembers. Absurdly, she suddenly wants to reach out and stroke her fingertips along it.

Maybe she would, if this was any other morning. If she was herself, her older self, her belongs-here self.

And even though she’s not, she could still touch Clint. She knows that. It would be so easy that for a moment, the thought of it makes it briefly hard to breathe – she could touch him without worrying what she was saying with it and he would welcome it. He might like it, if she stroked her fingers along his arm. If she pressed herself against his chest. Even now, even like this. 

“He’s had a hard morning,” she says instead, and lowers her voice. “He asked me upstairs if we were getting a divorce.”

Clint’s face does too many things at once: shock and sorrow and concern. “Oh God,” he says, and it sounds awful. “Oh God, my poor boy – ”

“It’s okay,” she rushes to assure him, and now she does touch him, she can’t not, her hands reach out and grab both his arms at once to squeeze in comfort. “We shouldn’t make a thing about it. I told him we’re fine.”

“But the idea that he’s worrying about it at _all_ ,” Clint says, his gaze sweeping right past her, through the doorway into the kitchen where Ben is arranging his eggs with his fingers in an effort to lie directly to their faces about having eaten the required two bites. The wave of adoration that rushes through Natasha at it – the twin gestures, the love on Clint’s face for his son, and this kid with his mischief that’s so very his father, but the sneakiness, it’s her, too, these stupid little things that shouldn’t have such an effect but they do, they do. “I thought we were doing okay.”

“I did, too,” Natasha admits. “But you know. Apple, tree…”

Clint smiles. It doesn’t make it all the way up to his eyes. “Natasha,” he says. “I know we’ve been hoping this is going to blow over, or that Shuri’s gonna come up with some miracle cure and your memories are gonna swoop back in, but.”

“But.”

“Maybe we start operating under the assumption that they’re not coming back,” he says. “And if they’re not, we have to figure out – I don’t know. Something.”

“Something besides a divorce,” she says, trying to make light of it and realizing a heartbeat later it’s not actually all that funny. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

“I hope not,” Clint says. “I love you.”

There is a wedding ring on her hand that matches his, and their son is sitting in the kitchen of the house they share, and he’s said variations of this over the last few days. But this is the first time Clint Barton has ever said those precise words to her and meant them in this precise way, this specific brand of love, an _I love you_ that encompassed more than _as my best friend, as my partner, as my soulmate on some level and never less than those very important things, but never more than them, either._

It’s so much. She didn’t know it would be so much, to hear it. She didn’t understand how it would matter.

It seems like Clint realizes it, what her silence means. He reaches his hands out carefully, settling them on her hips as though he wants to give her the option to pull away, and when she doesn’t, he draws her in just a little closer. “Shit,” he says, quietly. “I’m sorry, Nat.”

“For what?” 

“Six years feels like forever, but it’s not, is it? I know you don’t remember this, I just – I still keep forgetting that you’re coming from a time when you’re thinking you’re in love all on your own. And I shouldn’t have left you thinking that for so long.”

It stings for no real reason. Maybe it’s because it’s been her most private, quietly guarded secret for years. Even Steve never knew; never even suspected, and hearing Clint talk about it so casually – which, of course he would, it’s old news for him.

But it makes her feel raw and exposed, like this is a violation of the terms of their friendship. The way it’s always felt every time in the last year when she’s thought about – maybe saying something, telling herself there’d be no harm in _saying_ something other than the fact that it could ruin everything, and make him worry he was about to lose her after he’d already lost everything else and no, right, better to keep it contained inside her, where it’s always been.

She breathes. 

“Will you be mad if I eat one of his s’mores things instead of your eggs?” she says instead. 

“Yes, very,” Clint tells her, and releases her hips with a squeeze. “Don’t even fucking think about it.”

* * *

After Ben’s dropped off for the morning, they decide to go for coffee. It feels like it’ll be easier to relax in a public place, semi-neutral territory. Their house is filled with too many one-sided memories, all of it feels so intimate, and other than the grocery run, they haven’t really left their land; she wants to know more about this corner of the world that they chose to make theirs.

Strolling through town doesn’t jog anything loose, but more and more, Natasha understands why they would have settled here. The thought that he was only trying to duplicate his life with Laura but with gloomier weather, that’s been something gnawing at the edges of her brain, and seeing the place they’ve made a life settles that: it doesn’t remind her of Iowa at all, and she’s been hunting for similarities as though she’s been trying to prove something ugly to herself.

“Do they know who we are?” Natasha asks on the walk to the coffee place, after the third person greets them by name. “I mean – not just as a local family. They know we were Avengers?”

“Yeah,” Clint says. “It’s – weirdly refreshing? I don’t know, something about that last throwdown with Thanos, half the world disappearing, a quarter of them coming back, I think people just stopped giving a shit somewhere along the line.”

“I guess I don’t have a basis for comparison,” she says. “I’ve never really done the civilian thing.”

“I have,” he reminds her, and reaches out to take her hand. She lets him; after a moment of consideration, she threads their fingers together, and he looks pleased about it. “This is easier, in a lot of ways. Is it douchey to say the decade’s given me some perspective?”

“Yes, but I’m still interested in your conclusions,” Natasha tells him, and he smiles at her.

“I could only ever really be halfway myself, in Iowa,” he says. “The family guy – that’s who I am, yeah, that’s part of me. But that part had to be somebody separate from Hawkeye, and sometimes – no matter how much you like your life, no matter what you chose, that ends up being a hard way to live. Constant compartmentalization is a bitch.”

The coffee place is at the end of a long weathered pier. Faded red paint is peeling off the roof and the door and it looks like it’s about to blow into the ocean at any second. Inside, though, it’s warm and bright, with plants hanging everywhere. The menu is printed in alternating colors of chalk, neat block letters that take up one whole wall, and the barista is leaning over the counter on his elbows, reading a tattered fantasy paperback. He doesn’t even look up when they come in. Natasha likes it immediately.

“Want a minute to look at the menu?” Clint offers. 

“Don’t you already know what I’d order?”

He shrugs. “You should get to pick for yourself,” he says, another concession to the fact that she’s not entirely the person he married, and it makes her squeeze his hand in appreciation for his grace, his understanding. 

It makes her want to give him something back, and so she says “Surprise me. I’ll grab a table.”

Clint lifts their hands to his mouth to kiss the back of hers, his own show of appreciation, and surrenders his grip to go disturb the barista from his reading. There are a few scattered customers, mostly with laptops or books and headphones in, with plenty of open tables to pick from. Natasha chooses a booth upholstered in red glittering vinyl; it’s near a window that overlooks the water, which is considerably less angry and choppy than it’s been the last few days. 

When Clint comes back, he’s carrying two enormous mugs, one of them piled sky-high with whipped cream. Natasha raises an eyebrow. “You know what, don’t,” he says, nudging the other mug over to her. “This is a marshmallow French toast latte and in five minutes, you’re going to want to try it, and if you say one word, I’m not gonna let you.”

She hides her smile behind her own cup. Her own drink smells good; chai, she thinks. “Okay.”

“Thank you,” he says, and she spends a couple enjoyable minutes watching him try to figure out how to drink it in a way that won’t get whipped cream all over his face. When he can’t do it, she hands him the napkin she already had waiting. 

It feels normal. _So_ normal, and she remembers what he said outside the grocery store – if she doesn’t remember their marriage, he’s still her best friend, and so very little is different at a baseline level.

This is still just Clint. Why does it feel so hard to remember that?

There are easier questions to begin with, but the familiarity of the moment emboldens her to ask the biggest one hanging over her head. “Clint, how did I get pregnant?”

“My cock had a lot to do with it,” he informs her without skipping a beat. “I don’t believe in the pull-out method.”

Natasha snorts into her coffee, hard enough that mortifyingly, it splashes over the rim and onto her face. She kicks him under the table, grabbing for another napkin to wipe off her chin and upper lip. “Asshole.”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t pass it up,” he says, looking way too pleased with himself. “Nat, if it’s a reassurance at all – it was a pretty big shock for both of us. It’s not like we were trying, or like we’d ever talked about it. But we weren’t using protection, because – well, you know.”

“Yes,” she agrees.

“And then you were suddenly exhausted all the time, you couldn’t keep your eyes open, but you weren’t sick. You were just run down, and sore, and I started getting a little panicked that something serious was wrong. We flew out to New York, Shuri and Doc Strange put their heads together, and it turned out it didn’t take two geniuses to figure out what was up. Seven months later came Ben.”

“But _how_ ,” she repeats. “Graduation didn’t mean – coils, or blockages, it was a complete hysterectomy. It shouldn’t have been possible.”

Clint cups both hands around his mug. “It’s the biggest fucking fluke,” he tells her; four years after the birth of their son and he still sounds disbelieving. “Do you remember – I guess for you, it’d be pretty recent. You went out with Carol and Okoye…?”

“Off on the Skrull home world?” Natasha says, surprised. “That was maybe – I don’t know, a year ago. Carol didn’t want backup, Okoye told her she needed to start behaving like she was part of a team, I pretty much tagged along as hall monitor. And got stabbed for it in the middle of a dustup. Good times.”

Clint nods, like he’s waiting for her to get there herself, and so she tries to think back. “Soren had a gel pack that sealed it over, and Okoye gave me a shot from the first aid kit Shuri cooked up when we were on the way home. It’s part analgesic, part antibiotic, and part – ”

“Speeds up the healing process,” he says quietly, eyes on her face. “It was the best theory Strange could come up with. Something about how the two of them combined, they targeted what was perceived as an injury.”

“So that’s – it,” Natasha says, after a second. “That’s the magic secret to regenerating organs, forget all the neurosurgeons and starfish limbs and – throw a little Wakandan tech and some Skrull field medicine together and bake it inside a human oven?”

She sounds angry. She doesn’t know why she sounds angry. 

“It didn’t happen all at once,” Clint tells her. “They think it took a couple years to complete regrowth, and it’s not like there’s any way to replicate the theory. Not, uh, not ethically, at least. Like I said, it was a fluke. Nobody saw it because nobody knew they should be looking.”

He’s let go of his latte; without thinking, she reaches out to grab it, bringing it to her mouth for a sip exactly the way he predicted. He was right, it _is_ good. Not overly sweet and cloying like she assumed, there’s something sort of smoky laced through the marshmallow. 

Clint’s watching her warily, and it occurs to her that whatever happens next, however she reacts: this is something he’s already lived through. Maybe that’s what he’s anticipating. Did she yell? Did she freeze? Did someone say something stupid like _how lucky_ and catch the sharp side of her tongue for it? Because her tongue does feel sharp, right now, the edge of a razor and she is making a concerted effort not to slash at Clint; he’s only relaying information, and all things considered, he’s stuck to the facts, avoided editorializing. 

It wasn’t as though biological children were something missing from her life, it wasn’t some great need that left her feeling ravaged. But it’s hard to find objectivity about it so far onto the other side: Ben is here, a small person with opinions and needs and wants and preferences. 

Her anger over it had always been that the ability to decide had been taken from her. She was sixteen; a choice with a gun to her head was never really a choice at all, and she knows it. She was sixteen, and she had no concept of anything outside the Red Room. Other lives she might one day find herself in, other ways she might want those lives to look, and even if there _had_ been a concept of them, it wouldn’t have mattered, because the choice was graduation or failure, and failure was a synonym for execution.

And sometimes she mourned it. Not often, but every now and then.

She did. Sometimes, she would come to the farmhouse and see the swell of Laura’s belly, and she would know her own life was not built for anything like this, that she would have been no kind of parent, but she would wonder. And she would hate herself for wondering, she would shake it off as quickly as she was able. It was another thing she would set into a mental box labeled _not for me_. An idle fantasy that sometimes made her vaguely sad, but she was realistic enough to know it didn’t mean – it didn’t mean she should be considering other ways to make it reality. Only a ghost ship passing through the night; nothing to do but bear witness to it from the shore and wait until it disappeared over the horizon.

“My feelings are complicated,” she says after a minute, when she realizes she’s been silent for too long. 

Clint exhales, which is enough to let her know that yes, the first time they went through this, he’d gotten swiped a couple times with the razor. “That makes sense,” he says.

For a minute, she has to look away from him. The ocean is lapping at the poles supporting the pier; the sun has started to leak through the clouds, a little bit, and she wants to talk to Steve so powerfully that it’s a physical twist inside her. He has – had – such a way of being able to offer perspective, sometimes in a long speech, sure, but sometimes in a quick sentence. Distilling the issue down to the core that really mattered. 

The core here, she knows, is: even if it’s complicated, frustrating, confusing, emotional, look at where you’ve landed. Is it a place you want to be?

 _Yes_ , she thinks. _Yes, Steve, it’s humiliating how much I want to be here. It’s too vulnerable, it’s too much of me splayed open, I like it and I hate that I like it and I hate that there’s no hiding how much I like it._

“Can I ask you something uncomfortable?” she says. Clint nods. “Did you really want me to keep him?”

“Yes,” Clint says, without hesitation. His voice cracks on it. “Yes, Natasha, when we found out, I wanted you to keep him.”

She presses her lips together firmly, her insides giving another slow, lurching twist. “Really?”

“See, you’re asking the wrong questions,” he says, and swipes a hand over his face, although she can’t see any tears. Her eyes dart around to make sure no one’s listening, but there’s privacy in a public space, always. Everyone else is lost in their own little world; their own conversation, or books, or spreadsheets. “Was I scared out of my mind, that’d be a question. I was. Can’t remember the last time I felt terror like that. If I felt guilty – yes, but only a little. If it shoved a lot of grief for my other kids front and center again, you fucking bet it did, but there was never a second when I didn’t want this for us. It was goddamn embarrassing how much I wanted it, and I didn’t _know_ how badly I did until it was a possibility.”

Natasha takes his hands. Both of them, over the top of the table, and he squeezes hers so hard it almost hurts. “Do you believe me?” he says, near begging and this, she realizes – this is a fight he’s already had, too. This is a hurt he’s had to live through twice, her own doubt and insecurity, her own projection of what she assumed he’d feel with a fourth child on the way, when his first three didn’t survive and there was nothing he could do but keep going.

“I believe you,” she says, and Clint closes his eyes. Maybe it’s gratitude. “I do, Clint, I believe you.”

“You’re a great mom,” he says. “When we were thinking up names – you didn’t want to do it until we were nearly at the finish line, you kept thinking something was going to go wrong any second.”

“Sounds like me,” she says. His thumb circles her wedding ring once, twice. 

“We decided not to find out what we were having, and when we kicked around Ben as an idea – I can’t remember which one of us said it first, but you said you liked the alliteration. And I was surprised that, you know, that my last name was a given, you said – you said you wanted him to have the same name as his brothers and his sister. And I loved you so fucking much for that. You have no idea.”

She could say it back. 

She could. Natasha knows. She could say it back right now, and it would mean what it has always meant, because whether this is a Clint from their earliest days in SHIELD, the middle of their life as Avengers, if it’s a Clint from a year ago, from today, from six years in her future, from ten after that – she loves him. Has always loved him, has carried it inside her and tried not to let it spill over, and if she said it now when he’s aching like this, it would mean everything to him. 

What is holding onto it accomplishing? _He knows that she loves him_. He knows, now, how _long_ she has loved him. He’s become her husband. She’s become his wife. There’s nothing here to preserve and safeguard; he is bleeding in front of her, honest and open about the worst time in his life and the bumps on the way to what it took for him to believe he could build a new life, one he’s happy in, one where he is in love with her, married, raising a son.

A life that’s just taken a hit, even as they’re working at it. A son he couldn’t protect this morning, who was scared and nervous and anxious, nothing any parent wants their child to be, nothing any parent wants to think they helped _cause_.

 _Say it_ , she thinks. _Say it, he needs to hear it, don’t just fling it off with some joke or a subject change, don’t squirm away, say it, be his best friend if you don’t know how to be his wife, say it say it –_

She doesn’t say it. But she doesn’t make a joke, either, and that feels like a step in the direction she wants to be moving. 

Instead, Natasha comes around to his side of the booth, tucks her head against his shoulder. She feels the shudder that runs all the way through Clint at the gesture, the tension in his muscles and the loosening with relief when he winds his arm around her, pulls her in closer. She can feel the comfort he takes just from the touch.

“I’m here,” is what she tells him instead. “I’ve never wanted to be anywhere if you weren’t there, too.”

It’s the best she can do, but when Clint turns to look at her, she sees that it was good enough. For now, at least, but they can work with that. They’ve worked with less.

“I wish you remembered,” he says wistfully. “There’s been a lot of good stuff.”

“We have time,” she says. “I could order another one of those French toast monstrosities, and… maybe you could tell me some of them? I think I’m ready to listen to some of them.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she says. When he looks at her, visibly brighter at the idea, it is everything she can do to keep herself from kissing him. “Start with one. We’ll go from there.”

“Okay,” Clint says, and hugs her into his side. “Yeah. We’ll go from there.”

  
  
  


to be continued.

  
  
  



	4. Chapter 4

  
  
  


Natasha has never taught a yoga class in her life, but her older self – other self, _her_ self, she hasn’t quite settled on a way to think of it yet - left thorough, diligent notes on where she left off at the end of every week. There are specific class structures and schedules planned throughout the end of the month. Which, again, is another thing that feels like something she’d do, and it feels like something Natasha shouldn’t abdicate responsibility to keep going; if her memories do come back, this is clearly something that she enjoys. She doesn’t want to wake up on that day to find that she’s made a mess of everything she loves about her life.

And she can handle teaching yoga. She’s run training exercises with the Avengers for years, up to and including figuring out how to slot in new members, and compared to this crash course in learning how to be a parent, it really wasn’t an idea that could have made her apprehensive. Still: it’s been a pleasant way to pass an hour, and it’s nice to be proved right about something. 

The studio is dimly lit and smells like oranges, the floorboards a glossy honeycomb color with just enough scuff marks to prove they do steady business. It’s a small class; four women, only one of whom is under fifty; and two men, one of whom is in his early twenties and keeps throwing her vaguely hopeful glances. Kid with a crush, but not the kind that could bother her, and once he gets over it, he’ll probably drop the class entirely. 

Instead of soothing waterfall sounds, the playlist she found waiting for her is all hits from the 60s and 70s – The Temptations, the Jackson Five, the Four Tops – at a low volume, which she likes. It makes the class feel like exactly what Clint said this would be like, and Natasha hums along with Janis Joplin as she corrects one woman’s posture just a little, one hand at the small of her back. “Deeper breaths, Martha,” she suggests, her voice barely more than a murmur, and the woman nods twice, inhaling through her nose. 

_Fake it til you make it,_ she thinks as Martha smiles at her, the kind of smile that tells Natasha this is a tip she ends up giving to her at least once a week but the reminder helps every time. 

When class ends, everyone shuffles to the door, towels and mats tucked under their arms with smiles or waves – not a lot of conversation, which Natasha appreciates as she goes to turn off the music. The kid is the one that lingers at the door to the studio a little – God, _the kid_ , she really does feel ancient if she’s looking at someone in his midtwenties and seeing a child. 

“Anything I can help you with?” she asks. 

“Um – could I give you a ride home? Do you maybe need one?” he says, hopefully, and Natasha almost laughs. The guy has no game.

“Thank you,” she says, and smiles. “I’m meeting Clint in a little while, though. You know, Clint? My husband? Father of my very young child?” He colors immediately, and she would feel mean, but – it felt nice to say it, in a way she doesn’t want to examine too closely. 

“See you next time,” he says, and flees. 

Katya, who works the front desk, sets the schedules, and owns the studio, is laughing when Natasha comes out a few minutes later. “I swear your second favorite hobby is shredding Jason’s dignity,” she says fondly. 

“He can see my ring,” Natasha says, pulling her sweaty hair off her neck and coiling it into a low bun. “Nobody’s forcing him to keep shooting his shot.”

Katya shakes her head, but she’s smiling, the rhinestone stud in her nose sparkling at Natasha in a way that seems almost conspiratory. “One of these days he’s actually going to _see_ you with Clint and it’s going to crush him completely.”

It surprises Natasha, how widely she smiles at that, how self-satisfied she knows her smile is. It touches on some lizard-brained primal thing, _yes, we do make a very attractive couple, don’t we_ , the satisfaction of thinking that here is a person in her life who has never known Clint in any context other than _Natasha’s husband_. He’s only ever belonged to her.

It feels good. It feels _great_ , and as Katya pushes a cucumber-laced cup of water across the desk to her, she can’t bring herself to dull the edges of the grin even a little. 

“Got any new pictures of my favorite little guy before you bounce?” Katya asks. “I don’t know what it is about that kid. I usually don’t even like looking at pictures of people’s dogs if I have no emotional attachment to them.”

“Ben’s a pretty good one,” she agrees, and takes out her phone. There’s only one in there that she’s snapped herself; she’d wanted the memory and it had tightened something in her chest to watch. Clint’s sitting at their kitchen table, strong, capable archer’s hands laid flat, and on the other side of him is Ben with a rainbow array of nail polish bottles lined up – the explanation, Natasha had eventually learned, for the gloppy lemon polish she’d seen on her own hands the first day she woke up.

In the shot, he’s carefully painting each of Clint’s nails with multiple colors, the tip of his tongue poking out of his mouth and his forehead furrowed in concentration. He was trying to do stripes, and the whole thing was a cheerful mess. 

She’s almost hesitant to show it – it _feels_ private, but she knows it’s not. That’s not this life, not anymore, and her child’s sweetness and creativity, the joy Clint takes in being his father, those are things meant to take pride in, to share with people she cares about.

“Aw, look at your boys!” Katya says affectionately. “Too fucking cute.”

“Yeah. Those are my boys,” Natasha agrees. It’s starting to feel as though it’s actually the truth.

* * *

The house is empty when she gets back from class. Natasha knew it would be; Clint said he’d pick Ben up from school, take him to the pediatrician for his regular checkup, maybe stop by the hardware store and be back around three, so it’s not as though she didn’t have warning.

Still, there’s a moment when it’s strange: the turn of her key in the lock, the _thunk_ of the heavy front door closing behind her, and the quiet stillness that greets her. There’s a brief sense that she’s a guest, as though it’s a mild invasion of privacy to wander through someone else’s space when they’re not here even if she’s been invited, but the vague feeling dissipates, and she remembers:

This is her home. She’s not a guest in her own life.

Natasha raises her fingertips to touch the little stained glass window carved into the door, a small circle with a sunflower etched in the center that throws tiny puddles of yellow and green sunlight onto the opposite wall in abstract patterns. It’s the first time she’s been alone in the house, and as she moves through it, she keeps trailing her fingers along its surfaces. Relearning, maybe. Remembering. 

The scarred wooden table across from the door, a brass plate shaped like an arrow where she drops her keys. Clint’s enormous mug next to it, an inch of now-cold coffee left at the bottom like he was gulping it up until the exact moment he had to run out the door. Unopened mail, a couple catalogues. A coat rack, draped with her leather motorcycle jacket, Ben’s raincoat with the hood that looks like a frog, Clint’s heavy flannel shirt. She touches them all.

Her fingers skim the walls on her way to the kitchen, the tiny bumps in the paint and the ridges of the doorframe. The color is just uneven enough in some of the hard-to-reach spots that she knows – without having to ask for confirmation, for Clint to feed her the memory – that they did this themselves. She knows without asking that she did the painting while he changed the hinges, the knobs, the lightswitch covers, that he built that little table while she earmarked catalogue pages to find their couches, that they spent happy afternoons figuring out what they wanted this home to be, right to the last detail. 

She can see it like it’s playing out in front of her. Paint swatches tacked up all over the walls and the cheerful bickering, how they’re both people that need work, that need projects, that they have always loved to work together and they’d never done it quite like this. How badly they must have needed to concentrate on _something_ after they’d lost Steve, and Tony, after his family hadn’t returned, and the stuff of a life had been what they’d chosen.

When she reaches the kitchen, she opens drawers and cabinets, examines silverware and plates and the placement of things. The spice rack and stand mixer, the cookbooks and dish towels and bottles of olive oil. There’s an expensive-looking espresso machine next to a battered old coffee maker, which makes her smile; she’s noticed it before, but now she trails her fingers along the dinged pot, then the wire basket holding the multicolored pods, thinking about that, too. She listens for the echo of the argument it must have been, _the regular coffee maker is FINE, you just lived in the lap of luxury at Stark’s too long, oh please the day you discover you can buy pods in a thousand different flavors I won’t be able to stop you from ordering all of them at once_. 

Clint’s left a note for her on the fridge, tucked beneath a plastic magnet shaped like a pear. His messy borderline-illegible scrawl is the same as it’s always been.

_If you didn’t elope with Jason, I left you lunch. Enjoy the quiet!_

He’s doodled a tiny heart with an arrow through it at the bottom of the page instead of a signature, a gesture that sends another reflexive tug somewhere deep in Natasha’s stomach. She probably _would_ enjoy the quiet, under normal circumstances. Probably would have relished having a couple hours to herself after work, to nap or read or take a long shower, opportunities that get a little thin on the ground with a kid. 

Natasha opens the fridge and sees the plate he’s fixed for her is sitting right up front; nothing elaborate, not today. Just a turkey sandwich, some grapes and apple slices, a scoop of whatever vegetable salad thing he threw together for dinner last night. There’s a half-full bottle of red wine on the countertop too, and after a second of hesitation, she balances the plate in one hand, tucks the bottle under her arm, and ventures out onto the deck.

It’s a gorgeous day. Not too warm but it’s still sunny, and she can hear the surf in the distance, rhythmic and soothing as ever. “I’m not a guest here,” Natasha says out loud, even though there’s no one to answer her but the pine trees. 

She sets the plate down, then spends a few minutes figuring out how to get the hot tub bubbling. When the temperature feels comfortable, she peels her clothes off, folds them onto the outdoor table, then slides into the water with the food and wine beside her.

Because she’s allowed to do this. 

She’s allowed to stand naked on her own land, to sit in this hot tub, drinking warm wine straight from the bottle and admiring the view. She’s allowed to leave her keys in that brass arrow and toss her jacket wherever she wants and let the dishes stay in the dishwasher if she doesn’t feel like unloading it right away. She lives here. She is allowed to make herself at home.

And besides that, she can’t remember the last time she had an afternoon to just – _be_. Since well before she woke up here; the rush to put the world back to rights has been all-consuming. It’s pleasant to float, with her hair pinned up and no real responsibilities in front of her.

Natasha’s somewhere halfway between sleep and awake, lulled on the food and warmth and wine, until she hears the back door bang open enthusiastically awhile later – they must be home early. Quickly, she reaches out and turns the bubbles up to full speed so they’re frothy enough to cover her, mentally rolling her eyes at herself for failing to at least grab a towel before she got comfy. 

“Hi, Mama!” Ben shouts, barreling across the deck with Clint just behind him, carrying his tiny backpack and a bag from the hardware store. “Guess what? Only one shot, but I was brave _and_ they had Band Aids with Uncle Rocket on them!”

He displays the crook of his elbow to her proudly and it takes everything she has not to entirely lose her shit with laughter, not sure if it’s over the _Uncle Rocket_ or the cartoon rendering of their _raccoon friend_ strapped into a jetpack and soaring around through a sea of yellow stars.

“Rocket’s got merch?” she asks Clint, and some of the laughter sneaks out anyway, because the visual is too much, and she’s had a little wine.

“Not only does Rocket have merch, he has his own animated series that _spawned_ all the merch,” Clint says, grinning. “Disney found out that a talking raccoon existed and in a post-Thanos world when they had their operation back together, they pounced. He’s very proud of signing off on the licensing rights. They paid him so much money that I think he cackled terrifyingly for about ten minutes straight.”

“His cartoon is real dumb, but Daddy says I can’t tell him that,” Ben sighs. 

“Well, Daddy’s right, that wouldn’t be nice,” Natasha says. “You guys are home a little early, huh?”

“Somebody needs a nap,” Clint tells her. “Because without one, somebody was being a little a-s-s-h-o-l-e in the store. We left before I got everything I needed.”

“Is ‘somebody’ you or the kid?” she teases. He opens his mouth in faux indignation, grinning at her, and for a moment, she thinks this must be what it always feels like, here, in this place, this world, this life. 

“I am not a fast speller yet,” Ben says crossly, stamping his foot once. “That is cheating.”

Natasha reaches out to ruffle his hair. “Go pick out one book and I’ll come read to you in a second, okay?”

“Will you nap with me? Can we sleep in the big bed?” he begs, and Natasha nods her agreement. A nap sounds like a nice way to cap off the afternoon, and Ben dashes off to go examine his books for possibilities, leaving her alone with Clint.

“Thank you for the sandwich,” she tells him. “It was sweet.”

“Yeah, of course,” he says. “I was thinking - ”

He falters suddenly, and she wonders what the problem is until she realizes he’s noticed the pile of her clothes, folded up on the table. Her panties are tucked into a triangle on the top.

“Are you naked in there?” Clint asks a little weakly. “Like are you completely naked at this actual moment.”

“Might be.”

“…cool,” he says, after a second. His eyes are riveted to her face, as though if they stray one inch in any other direction, some terrible fate will befall the world. “That’s cool.”

The goosebumps spring up along the back of Natasha’s neck without warning, all on their own accord. Her nipples tighten and she squeezes her thighs together tightly. The _want_ is pouring off him in waves, even as he’s doing his best to keep a clamp on it. It’s visible, this sudden ferocious wave of hunger that’s swept through Clint, and it is entirely focused on her.

Clint wants her. _Clint_ wants her, Clint’s whole body is wearing his want like a badge, and several important pieces of knowledge strike her all at once, things she hadn’t considered until now. 

The first is that even if she can’t remember it, it should have occurred to her that they have absolutely fucked in this hot tub. They have fucked in this hot tub a lot, not just once, this has been a place where they have made a scrapbook of dirty memories together and Clint, right now, is reliving every one of them. 

The second is that when her memories disappeared, Clint’s entire sex life disappeared along with them. 

The third is that it’s been weeks for him and Clint is _missing the hell_ out of that sex life, if the only thing it’s taking to undo him right now is the idea that she’s naked without the benefit of the actual visual. He has been nothing but respectful about it, has never even brought it up, but the way he’s looking at her right now…

Clint is looking at her like he wants to fuck her, independent of the timing or the situation or anything other than the way _want_ is screaming its way through him. Over the smallest possible thing, and she digs her fingernails into her thighs to keep herself from whimpering in response. If she thought it was something to have Clint tell her that he loves her, his Natasha-centric desire is some other playing field entirely. 

_Clint wants her_.

The fact that they have a kid who could reappear at any moment is very literally the only reason two decades of restraint don’t snap in half right at this second. All she wants to do is grab him, drag him into the water with her, and sate everything all at once. Instead, she clears her throat, trying to reel her brain back in from where it’s spiraled out into the warm curls of steam. 

“Clint?”

“Hmm?” He’s still staring. 

“Do you – do we have a regular babysitter we trust? Someone local, you know, for the times Peter can’t make it up all the way from another state.”

It takes a second for him to comprehend her words. “Oh. Ah – yeah, we’ve got a couple.”

“You should see if one of them is free tonight.”

“I should?” He sounds dazed. 

Natasha nods. “Maybe you and I can go on our first date. Again.”

That sinks in, finally. When it does, Clint’s smile is the sunrise. “ _Absolutely_ ,” he says, beaming. “Jesus, yeah, I’ll go call right now. I’ll get you a towel and then – I will call right now.”

“Thank you,” she says, and she can feel her cheeks flush with pleasure. “Been awhile since I’ve been on a date.”

“I’ve got your six,” Clint promises. “You’re sure?” Hesitantly, he reaches out to touch her – just a stroke of two fingertips along her cheek, the same way she moved through the house, a touch that says he wants to remember the way this feels, and Natasha closes her eyes. A spark, a shudder, a _ripple_ all the way through her. 

“I’m sure,” she says, and she means it.

* * *

Natasha finds a casual green shirtdress in the back of their closet, slightly tight at the waist but not uncomfortably so, and Ben puts up a little bit of a fuss when they leave, but no real hysterics. It’s not a bad beginning to the night, and she feels a flutter of anticipation as she buckles herself into the passenger seat of their car, smoothing her hands along her skirt.

“So what’s the plan?” she asks Clint when he slides into the driver’s side. He looks good, too; he smells like soap and leather, he’s wearing jeans that fit him especially well.

“You tell me,” he says. “You’re the one who asked _me_ out. Person who asks does the planning.”

Her face must look as blank as she feels, because Clint grins like an asshole two seconds later. “Kidding,” he says. “I made reservations at this Thai place a couple towns over. Thought maybe we could catch a movie after if we’re not too beat?”

She whacks him on the shoulder and he laughs, sounding pleased with himself as he starts the car. “Too beat for a nine pm movie. Times have changed.”

“Yeah, we’re very old and responsible now,” Clint says. “Not that we weren’t responsible before, but – ”

“No, you’re right. In the years I was running the team, I still retained the ability to sleep in if I wanted it,” she tells him, and smiles. “You know, I actually sort of like it, when he throws those little tantrums.”

“You do, huh?”

“Yes,” Natasha says, trying to figure out how to articulate it. “I like that he feels – safe enough, to do that? Like it’s never occurred to him there could ever be consequences for acting out, or like we could love him any less for it.”

It sounds grim when she puts it that way, but she knows Clint understands. Their upbringings were similar in that respect, childhoods where neither one of them were children, so it surprises her a little when he reaches over and takes her hand, threading their fingers together and squeezing. 

“What?” she asks, curious. 

“Nothing. It’s just – you’ve said something like that to me before,” he says. “You said you knew you were doing your job right if your son felt like he was allowed to lose it at you.”

Natasha drags her thumb along the back of Clint’s hand slowly, looking down at the way they’re intertwined. “How about my husband?” she asks. “How did I know I was doing things right there?”

“Same way you always do,” he tells her. “It’s you and me, Nat. That’s always been right.”

“Pretty forward for a first date,” she says, feeling her smile spread over her face slow, warm. “Hey - what’d we do on our first-first date?”

To her surprise, Clint’s cheeks color. It’s the most goddamn charming thing she’s ever seen, and she laughs, delighted with it. “So we didn’t really have one,” she says, extrapolating, and that’s another delight, that it’s still this easy to read him – for both of them to read each other, off a gesture, a look, a reflex. “What was it, just a marathon fuck session?”

“Yeah, once the floodgates opened there was no slamming them shut. We came up for air about a week later,” Clint says. “But – I mean, there were a couple times we took a breather to order food or watch something on TV. Chafing was starting to become a problem. In a way, it was datelike.”

“I love you,” Natasha tells him.

It slips out on its own, and Clint’s head snaps to the side, shock and surprise and radiant joy all at once. Natasha’s eyes widen – startled, too, startled with herself. With the way it just happened, loosed out like they’re three words she hasn’t spent years of her life strangling inside her. Like it’s the easiest thing in the world, the most honest. 

“I do,” she says. “I know you know that. I know it’s not some big revelation, not for you, but I’ve loved you for so long that I can’t remember a time when I didn’t. It’s always there. I was ashamed of myself for a long time, but I couldn’t stop it. I don’t think I wanted to try, either, not really. I love you. Is it okay that this me still loves this you? Even with missing – time, and memories, and – is that okay?”

By way of reply, Clint pulls the car over onto the side of the road so abruptly that someone honks behind them, headlights speeding past. He throws the car into park, hands off the wheel so that he can cradle her face in his hands.

His grip is firm, the calluses along hands that haven’t worn down at all in the years out of the field, and she thinks of how much work he does with his hands. Carpentry and cooking, engine repairs and carrying their son, the way she has watched him blend back and forth between easy violence and infinite gentleness and the knowledge that if she wants it, this gentleness is hers, too. 

“Let me kiss you,” he says, hoarsely. “I’ve been going fucking crazy not kissing you for weeks, Nat, and you know I can be shit at words, so tell me you’re gonna let me show you how okay it is.”

“Do you know how terrifying it is to wake up with everything you ever wanted?” she whispers. Her hands are stretching across the divide in the car, reaching out for his button-down shirt. The fabric is twisting and reshaping itself around her fingers, she’s pulling and tugging and dragging him closer, his breath is on her face, her lungs feel too small. “And I can’t remember how I earned it.”

“You didn’t _earn us_ ,” Clint says, almost a growl. His forehead is against hers, thumbs dragged roughly beneath her jaw. “I was yours _decades_ before you put this ring on my finger, Natasha, and if you were ever ashamed of loving me, it’s because you knew that really, I always was.”

It’s a sharp spike of heat, all the way through her.

It makes her want to apologize, but there’s no one left to apologize to and there’s nothing to apologize for, not anymore, because he’s right. He’s right, in so many ways, he was always hers, and the weight of not being able to have something she knew had been meant for her, the weight of denial and dancing around it and the inability to let go – 

But here he is.

“Yes,” she says, it’s a _yes_ that means a hundred different things and Clint understands every one of them. He crushes his mouth to hers and in all the years she tormented herself wondering what it would be like to kiss Clint Barton, somehow she never imagined that his hunger would equal hers. 

It’s better than imagination, than fantasy. It’s the real thing. The buckle of the seatbelt is digging into one of her kidneys at an angle that’s almost painful, Clint’s body is halfway over the seat, her foot almost tags the gearshift in her haste to twine herself around him – it’s perfect, every wrong note is still singing in the right key because it means it’s real, it’s real, it’s real.

He sinks one hand into her hair and mouths long her jaw, down her neck urgently. He’s finding places that _she_ didn’t even know about, little gasps erupting from her at every new trail of his tongue – it’s territory he’s well-mapped over the years and she knows he’s showing off, but she could never call him out on it.

She licks her way back into his mouth and he makes a noise that she feels all the way through her like a low, throbbing baseline. Two of the buttons on his shirt pop beneath the eager twist of her hands, flying off hard enough to hit the windshield with a _ping_ and the sound makes him pull back from her, just a little. 

Clint’s eyes are stormy with want. His mouth is slack and wet and he’s wearing more of her lipstick than she is, a smear on his upper lip and a streak of rose at one side of his mouth, like he was dressing up as the Joker and got distracted halfway through putting the makeup on. Natasha snorts with laughter, reaching up to pet the side of his face with trembling hands. 

“Backseat?” she suggests.

He shakes his head, but he still looks wild-eyed. “I’m too goddamn old to have sex in the back of a car, I’m going to cramp up. Plus there’s a booster seat back there, it’s even less room than you’d think.”

“I’m still very flexible,” she says, tapping one of her knees against the side of his hip to prove it. It sends the buckle digging sharply into her kidney again, though, making her wince and now it’s Clint’s turn to laugh – a happy sound, a great one as he brushes his mouth softly to hers again.

“We’re gonna want the space,” he says, and the promise in it makes her shiver. “I’m gonna need to go down on you until your brain completely dissolves, and I just can’t pull it off the same way with the car door open and my knees on the gravel.”

“Tease,” Natasha says, running her arms along his shoulders, his back. She doesn’t want to stop touching him, but he’s painting a very appealing picture. “We’re skipping the movie.”

“We are skipping the movie,” Clint agrees fervently, and they lose a few more minutes to kissing until her stomach starts audibly growling. They manage to pry themselves apart, and everything just seems – supremely hilarious, on the way to the restaurant, as Natasha fumbles in the glove compartment for hand wipes to rub the lipstick stains off his face, to fix her own hair as best she can, to try and figure out how to tuck his shirt at an angle that’ll hide the missing buttons. 

They’re only a few minutes late for their reservation. Clint bumps his feet against hers beneath the table, grinning in a way that looks _giddy_. They order way too much food, a coordinated effort to keep their hands off each other; the restaurant is great, warm and fragrant, bustling with people and conversation and every dish their waiter brings is better than the last. 

Natasha’s slurping through her second plate of spicy noodles when Clint reaches over the table to take her hand. She was right in her assessment; if they’ve always been tactile with each other, marriage really has made them even more so, and she loves knowing she was right. She loves a world where Clint wants to touch her as much as she wants him to do it.

“What if my memories never come back?” she asks, though she hates to mar the perfection of the moment. 

Clint reaches to spear a stray piece of chicken at the edge of her plate with the fork in his other hand. “Then we get busy making new ones,” he says, as though it’s just that easy. 

_Maybe it is _, she thinks. Maybe for the first time in a long time, Natasha wants to let herself believe in something easy.__

  
  
  


to be continued.

  
  
  



	5. Chapter 5

  
  
  


In the dream, the sky is always red and thick with smoke. 

The smell burns in Natasha’s nose, stinging the back of her throat. An explosion, somewhere off in the distance, then Tony’s thrusters firing again, again, again, but somehow it’s all - muted. The battle is a sea of destruction. It is hell on a scale worse the worst she saw years ago, in Wakanda, and she is standing in the middle of it, but there’s a thick layer of separation between herself and the storm. It’s as though she stopped being part of it at some point, watching it unfold like this is a documentary and she’s only half-paying attention to the television.

_NAT! Natasha, oh God oh God please – NOT NAT, PLEASE NO –_

It’s Clint, screaming - _screaming_ , he sounds like he’s in agony, but she can’t turn her head, can’t tell where it’s coming from, can’t see him but he must be close by if she can make out his screams in the din – 

Her head rings. The sting in her throat is worse, her eyes are watering, there’s blood on her forehead trailing down the side of her face, but she’s not hurt. 

_I’m okay,_ she tries to shout back, but her lips are moving soundlessly. She can feel the shape of the words, but nothing’s coming out. 

_Why am I okay_ , she wonders, her eyes darting around. _Steve. Steve was –_

Natasha turns her head, just a little, and there he is – still at a bit of a distance. Steve hit the ground knees first, she remembers, and one of his arms is bent at a strange angle, his face turned to the side, away from her. He’s fallen like a pile of laundry someone kicked over, loose and formless. She was running, she broke her position and ran to him, and maybe it’s not too late, but her movements are so slow. The sounds of the battle are muted and her body feels like she’s moving through molasses. 

She blinks. Tries to clear her vision. When she turns her head back, she realizes Thanos is kneeling before her.

Even on his knees, Natasha has to look up to meet his eyes. He is enormous up close, in a way she didn’t really comprehend in Wakanda. Then again, she never got anywhere near him the last time she rushed him; now she can see every imperfection in his skin, every splatter of blood and dent in his armor. He looks sorrowful in a rooted, ancient way. He looks exhausted.

This is the monster that slaughtered half the world with a snap of his fingers. This is the thing that may have just killed Steve. What right does he have to grieve for anything at all?

_Oh, little one,_ he says, as though he aches with it.

_I am a grown woman,_ Natasha says, lips still moving without sound, but she knows he hears her. The same way she can hear him. _They call me the Black Widow. They call me a thousand names that mean nightmare, but I call me Natasha Alianovna Romanoff, and it is a name I made for myself. I have led the Avengers, and the Guardians, and held your survivors together with my hands, and you will not make me into something small because you think a body count in the billions made you something big_.

In the distance, there is another explosion. It’s muffled, watery, and Natasha is afraid. She is. But she does not blink as she stares down the mad titan.

_Oh, little one,_ he repeats, with that same deep sorrow. Empathy from Thanos is somehow more terrifying than bloodlust could be. _Your boy is such a beautiful child._

* * *

Natasha sits upright in bed, shaken entirely out of sleep.

Her heart is thundering in her chest, so hard that she can feel her pulse twitching at the side of her neck. Her skin is clammy and wet; she’s bitten down on the inside of her cheek so hard that she tastes blood.

It’s still dark outside and everything is familiar – the cold, the pine smell, Clint nestled up beside her – but the fear sparking and roiling through her won’t be contained. She throws the covers aside and leaps from bed, moving at a speed her body remembers even though it hasn’t moved this fast in years, she is _flying_ from their bedroom, down the hall, vibrating in wild, painful panic as she throws open the door to Ben’s room with a knot of fear coiling hot in her belly and the scream building itself up the back of her throat. 

But everything is exactly as it should be. 

Ben is on his side in his twin bed, sleeping in perfect, trusting peace. One of his hands is curled up under his chin and he’s washed in a warm glow from his nightlight, plugged in across the room. There are at least ten stuffed animals sharing the bed with him, buffering him from rolling too close to the wall, and the quilt is pulled all the way up around him, like he burrowed further down in his sleep.

She sometimes burrows that same way.

Natasha sucks in a breath that sounds like a sob, even in her own ears, and she moves across the room to kneel at the side of his bed. This close, she can hear him breathing. 

She reaches out a hand to stroke through his hair. So like hers, the same loose curls, the same deep red that will probably darken closer to brown as he gets older, but for right now, when she bends her head over him, there’s no telling where her hair ends and his begins. She kisses his cheek, peachy and smooth, draws another deep, shuddering breath as she mentally insists that she won’t wake him up just so she can hold him – he’d cry and it would only ruin the next day for him, sleep disturbed and schedule disrupted. 

How did Clint lose his children and survive it?

How did he live? How did he wake up after they blew away in the wind and still manage to set his feet on the ground, to hydrate, to eat, to keep breathing? Vengeance was the only thing he could grab onto, and Natasha understands it now in a way she didn’t, then, not entirely. She remembers thinking the hell he rained onto the worst of the leftovers was just something he’d have to get out of his system before he could start to grieve in a more – constructive way, maybe. He was not the only one who had lost people, but the idea of it, the idea that she assumed she understood that kind of grief, or at least understood it well enough, makes her burn with shame now. 

She remembers how she practically dragged him back to New York by the roots of his hair, and if he had caved and come along, it was because he had loved her enough to agree to try. It is very possibly the most humbling realization she has ever had in her life.

Natasha kisses Ben’s cheek again, runs her fingers through his hair one more time. “I love you,” she whispers. “You’re safe, my little love, I’m here.”

Ben sighs in his sleep, a soft small yawn as he snuggles into his pillow. She nuzzles at him one more time, breathing in – her baby, her baby and he’s just fine, nothing’s touched him, no genocidal titan has ever even learned his name. After another moment, she forces herself to stand, and when she turns, she sees Clint’s come to find her.

His eyes say this has happened before. And that sometimes, he’s the one who needs to listen to their baby breathing.

Clint is leaning against the open doorway, arms folded over his bare chest and his hair a sleepy mess. Moonlight filtering through the curtains highlights his tattoo sleeve, and she understands that now, too – they died and it left no physical mark on him, so he needed to mark it himself, needed it to hurt, needed his loss to be something he wore on the outside.

“Nightmare?” he whispers.

Natasha nods, and then she’s moving across the room to curl her arms around his neck. She needs the solid reality of his body against hers, the warmth of his skin, the strength in his hands, and Clint obliges immediately. He grips her ass and hefts her up in the same moment she pushes off from the floor. Her legs lock around his waist in an iron grip, and he turns from their son’s room swiftly, guiding her back down the hall to the rumpled mess of their bed.

Clint is inside her before they hit the mattress; there’s no time to think about it and her body’s accepting him with something that feels very like gratitude. He’s thrusting in short, firm movements, trying to work himself into her at a better angle as her tee shirt rides up around her waist, and it feels right, it feels like exactly what she didn’t know she asked for. 

Natasha’s fingers scrabble at the back of his neck, her heel bearing down in the small of his back for purchase, and she realizes her cheeks are wet when he bends to kiss them. It’s not sex in a way she’s ever had it, and it occurs to her sharply, all at once, that this is grief sex. This is love, this is connection, this is sex that’s about sex, yes, but it’s about a hundred different other things too, and her hands are trembling as she smooths them along Clint’s neck, as she strains for his mouth. 

“You think they’ll ever stop?” she whispers, pitching her hips up to him and concentrating. _Remember this, remember how he feels inside you._ “The nightmares.”

“I don’t know,” Clint whispers back. His mouth is at her cheek, her jaw, her collarbone, back to her lips. “I don’t know, sweetheart, they haven’t yet, but we’re still here and that’s bigger than the rest of it.”

_We’re so happy here,_ she thinks. _Do you get to be happy like this when it grows out of that much sorrow? The things we lost, the things we gained…_

He hits an angle inside her that’s so good it makes her yelp, a little louder than she meant to, and he skates a hand along her side soothingly, up beneath her shirt. They’re making love on top of the blankets, fumbling their way into a steadier, smoother rhythm and there’s no rush anymore. It’s _relaxing sex_ , it’s unknotting Natasha’s stomach, it’s loosening her spine, and she shudders as one of Clint’s hands strokes her face, tilting her chin towards him.

“Be here,” he murmurs. “Be here with me, Natasha, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “Yeah, yes, c’mon.” Her fingers curl in the comforter, her other hand cupped at the back of his neck, because she goes where Clint goes, and he can’t follow her into the labyrinth of her own worst memories. He was there, on that day. He remembers. He carries those sorrows and scars, too.

And they decided together that they wouldn’t drown under them. But grief has long arms, it’s harder some days than others and it something they have to decide it over and over again. They’re deciding now. That is what this is.

Clint comes first. She watches his face as it happens, feels the way the tendons in his neck clench and release, the press of his chest to hers as he bears down, like he’s trying to sink as deep as he possibly can as he spills into her.

“Sorry,” he whispers. His skin is damp and when he kisses her, he’s still shaking with it. “Sorry, that was a little fast, Nat, sorry.”

“You’re the only Barton in this bed complaining,” she whispers back, and the grin on his face to hear her use their name, when he’s this warm with afterglow – that’s it, somehow, that’s what grounds her. It shakes the last vestiges of the nightmare away, leaves it six years in the past where it belongs. “But if you’re unhappy with your timing, wanna get me there and make it up to me at the same time?”

“God, yes,” he breathes. “Gimme, gimme.” He nuzzles at her face, her chin, her throat, finds his way down her body and sets up shop between her legs. His mouth is hot and greedy, he’s licking into her cunt with an eagerness that’s almost indecent. 

It’s wet and sloppy and skilled all at once, it’s heaven as he makes her bow and twist and bend underneath him. Clint turns her into a mess and then brings her somewhere beyond _mess_ , to a point where she can’t tell if it’s still for her or if it’s because he can’t bring himself to stop eating her out, and the answer doesn’t really matter. She muffles her noises in her forearm, she lets him drive wherever he wants to take her.

He has to wipe his mouth and chin on the bedsheet when he finally relents, and the sight of it forces another twitch from her sated, spent body.

“Jesus, Clint,” she says. Her voice _cracks_ , and he gathers her into his arms, looking satisfied. “That’s – that’s one way to drive off a nightmare, sure.”

Clint drops a kiss on her shoulder. “You have the world’s most suckable pussy. Take your share of the blame.”

She tries to swat at him, but her arm is too limp to do much, and she smiles as he nuzzles her shoulder again, pulling her closer, tangling them together. Her shirt is still on and Clint has one hand beneath it, resting high on her stomach, just under her breasts. They’re too warm to be this close, sticky and messy besides, and she nestles her face into his neck anyway. She can hear his heartbeat.

“I love you,” he whispers into her hair. “Every you. Always.”

“Every you,” Natasha murmurs back. “Every one of ‘em.”

When she fades back to sleep, she doesn’t dream of anything at all.

* * *

Sam FaceTimes to check in a few days later; to him, it hasn’t been that long since they’ve talked, but for Natasha, it’s been years. She’s missed Sam desperately, would have reached out herself if the situation here on the ground at home had required even just a little less of her full concentration. She rubs a thumb affectionately over the rendering of his face on her phone. The pixilation is so clear that he could be leaning in through a window.

“How’s our team mascot?” he asks. 

“He’s great,” Natasha tells him. “He’s kicking his dad’s ass in checkers for the fifth time in a row.”

“You don’t get to play the winner?” Sam asks.

“I’m on a time out,” she says. “Ben caught me cheating.”

“He caught you - you cheated while you were playing a board game with your child?”

“I don’t like losing!” Natasha says. She is aware she says it with too much indignation. “Besides, it’s good for him to learn that sometimes your opponent plays dirty. And I like that he’s sharpened his observational skills enough to catch me.”

“God, this is the Soviet assassin school of raising babies. You sound like Bucky the last time Morgan spent the night at our place.”

“How _is_ your gentleman caller?”

Sam scowls, but she can see right through it – it’s a scowl that’s mostly a grin. His eyes are too bright to be anything else. “Still a dumbass. Lucky I’m still putting up with him and never shows enough appreciation for it, if you ask me.”

“I did ask you,” she points out. “And fuck off, because you look delighted that I asked you. You happy, Wilson?”

“Yeah,” he says after a second, still with that grin that’s lost any hints of scowl by now. “Happiness sort of felt like an impossible ask, for awhile there. You know.”

“I do.” 

They’re quiet for a minute. There was a time there when it was the three of them against the world, herself, Sam, and Steve, and when the Avengers shifted and expanded, when they fought and disagreed on ideology, there was still a familial thread there linking the three of them together. There was a time when, if someone had asked Natasha about _her boys_ , it would have meant Steve and Sam. 

Steve’s gone, now, and Natasha knows that she is, too, even if Sam can still pick up the phone and reach her whenever he likes. If this isn’t quite the same situation as it was with Clint, Natasha knows what it feels like to watch a partner hang it up while you can’t bring yourself to do the same. It _is_ a loss, especially on the heels of losing Steve, and she knows to acknowledge it at such.

“So yeah. I am, and it’s wild that I am, and if you tell him I told you that – ”

“Please. Just because I’m a mom now doesn’t mean you could take me in hand to hand, Captain America.”

He laughs, a deep, real, Sam Wilson belly laugh that brightens his whole face. “The memory loss means there’s any chance I could convince you to come off the bench? We miss you around here.”

Natasha opens her mouth automatically to say she misses them, too, but something makes her pause, because – well, she’s not entirely sure that she does. It’s not her team anymore, not really, not the way Clint described it to her. New players, for one thing, new threats, new alliances. If she rejoined, it would be starting over again. Between all her years in SHIELD and all her years on the Avengers, the one thing that could really be counted on was that change was constant – that they were always starting over again, in some ways. They shuffled people around, they expanded, they splintered and came together, but every year looked markedly different than the last. 

Here in Oregon, there’s a pleasant sort of sameness to things. When change happens, it seems like it comes in incremental waves. There’s consistency. It’s not just that it’s quiet here, it’s that it’s steady.

Steve was always really the only constant, since SHIELD fell. If she misses the job, the team, she misses the memory of what it used to be. What she misses doesn’t exist and never will again, not really. It was home, but it’s a home that’s gone now, and Natasha’s never been someone who digs around in the past and expects to unearth anything that still fits.

“I don’t know, I think going back to being a good soldier would be a little hard after all the time I spent running the show,” she says neutrally. “And I don’t want to challenge Carol to an arm-wrestling contest to retake my crown, so…”

“Fair enough,” Sam says, though he doesn’t do a very good job of keeping the disappointment off his face, and Natasha realizes that he was expecting her to say yes.

It sends a little spike of irritation through her. There’s something unfair about it – unfair for her to feel irritated, but more unfair that he would ask when he _knows_ – but she also doesn’t want to start a fight, so she clears her throat. 

“Hey, I should get back in there,” she tells him. “I promised I’d use my time-out wisely, which I think means I’m supposed to provide them with snacks, so…”

“You got it,” Sam says. “Don’t be a stranger, Nat. Take care of yourself.”

“You too, Wilson. Bye,” she says, and disconnects the call. She stands still in the kitchen for a moment, drumming her fingers against the counter and examining it, this irritation that’s not fading. It _bothers_ her, that Sam asked. That he expected the absence of the last few years would…would what, exactly?

Maybe it’s because Sam didn’t live through the immediate post-Snap years. Natasha’s read up on the time she’s missing; they managed to pull back a quarter of what Thanos had snapped away, which is exactly what Clint called it – a sort-of win, enough to simultaneously count and still feel like it’s a failure, given the lives they traded to do it. But to a lot of the world, a quarter still felt like such a gift, such a balm over the raw hole in the universe. 

It was enough to get things _turning_ again, for humanity to start moving forward instead of the halfhearted, sluggish attempts of the post-Snap grief wave that had enveloped what felt like the whole world. Sam came back once the world was finally waking up from its long night. 

And waking up here, waking up in this life – Natasha didn’t fully realize how much weight she’d been under, especially as the woman with both hands on the wheel. Not until the weight was gone. She doesn’t want to pick it up again. It surprises her a little to realize it, but it’s true. 

_I think – Steve, Tony, that last day. I think that was really the end for both of us_ , Clint told her. 

Natasha finally understands what he meant. She didn’t put it down because of Ben, not entirely, or for Clint. She put it down for herself. She _chose_ this life with both hands, not because she was in a relationship, not because of a surprise pregnancy. She had looked around at the people and the years she had lost, and she became someone who decided she was going to choose a different life. 

And it was not her older self that chose it. It was _herself_ , who she is now, a couple months on the other side of the showdown on Titan, maybe, but it was some familiar version who had no idea that _this_ was what the future would hold, not exactly. 

But she was the one who made the decision to allow for different kinds of possibility. She was the one who opened up the door that allowed _this_ life to eventually settle roots, and for the first time – for the first time, she understands why she made that choice. It’s not the same as her memories returning, but it feels as though a key turned in a lock. A little click that’s letting her peer in through a crack.

She understands herself a little better today than she did yesterday. That feels incredible.

Natasha walks back into the den, where Clint and Ben are still locked in combat over the checkerboard. Ben’s curled up in the brown leather armchair while Clint’s on the floor in front of the coffee table, languorously sprawled out. She goes to sit beside him, and when he comfortably drapes an arm around her shoulder, she stretches out to recline against his chest. Clint kisses the top of her head absently, like a reflex. It’s very nice. 

“Who’s winning?” she asks. 

“Nobody, I’ve only got one king,” Ben informs her, pushing a red piece forward. “But probably I’ll win again. Daddy’s not as good at this as he is at Uno.”

Natasha raises an eyebrow at Clint, which means _Are you losing on purpose?_

Clint crosses his eyes at her, which means _Obviously. Because he’s four. And I’m not a competitive psychopath like you._

It makes her lean up to kiss his cheek, and she loves the way he smiles when she does it, as though it’s an unexpected gift she’s given him. “Mmmm, I don’t know, I think he’s pretty good at a lot of things,” Natasha says, smiling back. “I think we should keep him around, Ben, what do you think?”

“I think yes,” Ben says decisively, and Clint laughs. 

“Thanks, both of you. Glad the democratic process didn’t result in me getting kicked out of my own family,” he says, and nudges one of his black pieces forward. “Ha! King me, kid. This ties things up a little.”

“We should play for something this time,” Ben says happily. “Like if I win, I get a _fourth_ book at bedtime.”

“Oh yeah? What do I get if I win?” Clint says, laughing. 

“Obviously you would get to _read_ him a fourth book at bedtime,” Natasha says, squeezing his knee, and it makes Clint laugh again, a low rumble that she can feel against her back. “How about we make it a more immediate reward, little love? Winner gets ice cream before dinner.”

“That is a very good thing to play for, Mama,” Ben informs her. “Good job.”

“Yeah, I’ve got great ideas sometimes,” she says, and reclines more comfortably against Clint’s chest. He snakes an arm around her waist, squeezing her hip, and when she turns her head to the side, she can see it. As easily as they always understand each other without words, she can see what it means to him that she’s letting him touch her this way. That if her memories are gone, they’re still fumbling their way back to each other. 

He nuzzles her hair quickly, just once. “You know, you’re still in time out. You could go read or something if you don’t want to watch us play.”

“I’ll stay and watch. I’m happy right where I am,” Natasha tells him, and smiles at Ben. “I want to watch my son win that ice cream, if it’s all the same to you guys.” Clint squeezes her hip again, in the same moment that Ben beams at her. That sweet little kid smile, bright and genuine and entirely without guile. 

It’s without a doubt the best smile Natasha has ever seen.

  
  
  


to be continued.

  
  
  



End file.
